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Lot 25

 

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Arpita Singh, born in 1937, began her professional life as a designer and textile consultant at the Weaver's Service Center in Kolkata and New Delhi. It was this experience that honed the artist's skills with decoration and patterns - skills which she continues to use to construct and ornament the narratives that underlie and inform her paintings.

Though they may at first seem esoteric and even stylistically naive, each of Arpita... Arpita Singh, born in 1937, began her professional life as a designer and textile consultant at the Weaver's Service Center in Kolkata and New Delhi. It was this experience that honed the artist's skills with decoration and patterns - skills which she continues to use to construct and ornament the narratives that underlie and inform her paintings.

Though they may at first seem esoteric and even stylistically naive, each of Arpita Singh's paintings has an important story to tell. Her works "…celebrate the rituals of family life while questioning the myth of cosy domesticity. Her palette is brightly coloured and exuberant, but her themes can be dark and daunting. She paints people she knows - family, friends, neighbours - surrounded by an assortment of everyday objects. Flowers, teapots, and pillows appear alongside guns, knives, and aeroplanes" (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern & Contemporary Indian Artists, India Book House, Mumbai, 2005, p.84).

In the present lot, a canvas Singh painted in 1998, the artist offers us the central seated figure of a man wearing a heavy black coat, appearing to be in deep contemplation or mourning. Behind him, the increasingly non-chronological dates of a calendar share space with a passing plane. Although painted in the late 1990s, this painting continues the exploration of issues of communal violence that underpin the urban Indian existence that Singh embarked on during the previous decade, and may be read as one of the gentle socio-political comments she started making through her work during that period. Here, images hinting of separation, irrecoverable losses and journeys without return express the aftermath of communal violence and its effects on the individual and the family.

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