Important Notice

Known for her vibrant palette and recurring motifs, primarily of everyday domestic objects, 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... Known for her vibrant palette and recurring motifs, primarily of everyday domestic objects, 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)

In the present lot, the central figure is surrounded by an assortment of embedded motifs as well as floating numerals, referring to the dates on a calendar or numbers on a watch, alluding to the passage of time. "Of late, Arpita often paints the ageing woman - as icon, as protagonist, sometimes naked - baring the postmenopausal sexuality of her body, as cavernous as it is vulnerable." (Nilima Sheikh, "Of target-flowers, spinal cords, and (un)veilings," Arpita Singh: Memory Jars, New York: Bose Pacia Modern, 2003) While the title of the work, Jars, suggests containment and preservation, it is juxtaposed with the free and "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. As a compositional device, Singh often lavishes great attention on the outer edges of her canvases, creating wide margins that contain ancillary elements... The images on the edges of Singh's pictures may function as footnotes or addendums to the main image, in these margins a fleeting thought or a whispered secret can be easily accommodated." (Peter Nagy, "The Simplest of Means of Arpita Singh," Arpita Singh: Memory Jars, New York: Bose Pacia Modern, 2003)

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