Important Notice

Lot 20

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, 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... 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, 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 this work from 1998, titled 31 Days of December, Singh offers us the central seated figure of a man wearing a heavy black coat, in deep contemplation or mourning. Behind him, the increasingly non-chronological dates from a calendar share space with a passing plane. Although painted in the late 90’s this work explores issues of communal violence that underpin the urban Indian existence. This piece can be read as one of Singh’s gentle socio-political comments. Here, it is the aftermath of communal violence and its effects on the individual and the family that she expresses – the separation and irrecoverable losses.

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