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Lot 24

 

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"The world that I paint is part real, part naive; there are things that I see around it could be as simple as telephones, aeroplanes, flowers or guns - and pair it with anything that I want to say at that moment." - ARPITA SINGH

Known for her vibrant palette and recurring motifs, Arpita Singh packs many incongruous ideas and emotions into her layered works, which draw from a wide range of allusions and influences. After... "The world that I paint is part real, part naive; there are things that I see around it could be as simple as telephones, aeroplanes, flowers or guns - and pair it with anything that I want to say at that moment." - ARPITA SINGH

Known for her vibrant palette and recurring motifs, Arpita Singh packs many incongruous ideas and emotions into her layered works, which draw from a wide range of allusions and influences. After graduating from the Delhi College of Art, Singh worked as a consultant with The Weavers Service Centre, and her paintings often reflect the textured nature of a weave or patchwork. Singh "recycles her modernist expertise for painting in oil and grafts onto it as varied sources as naturalism, picture book illustration and the textile crafts - weaving, stitching and embroidery," lending a sense of pattern and repetition to the "elaborately coded world" of her painting. (Nilima Sheikh, Arpita Singh: Paintings 1992-1994, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1994)

The present lot features a smartly and brightly-clad man seated in a chair, against a yellow background peppered with numbers, reminiscent of the "ceaseless march of calendar dates... Humans may struggle to control time, tracking it incessantly with numbers, but it pushes ahead ceaselessly as the natural world progresses irrespective of the human. (Peter Nagy, "The Simplest of Means of Arpita Singh," Arpita Singh: Memory Jars, New York: Bose Pacia Modern, 2003) The top half of the painting explores this further through two figures - a man running, hurrying along his way, and a nude, ageing woman. The latter would become a dominant motif in Singh's work from the early 2000s, and "the ageing female body emerged as one of the telling metaphors of the poignancy of the passage of time" and the uncertainties of the future. (Ella Datta, Cobweb, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2010, p. 9)

A few years later, critic Holland Cotter would write of Singh's work, "The psychological and the political merge in paintings by New Delhi artist Arpita Singh. So do everyday life and allegory, expressionism and ornament, historical sources from Bengal folk painting to Marc Chagall, and a formal approach that is at once unassuming and hard-worked, gauche and poised." ("Art in Review; Arpita Singh," The New York Times, 3 October 2003) These elements and her style, which would develop over the years, can be seen in the present lot.

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