Important Notice

"Life is like a dollhouse. We are all always playing musical chairs. Playfulness is my language, not my subject."
- ARPITA SINGH

Arpita Singh's work is frequently inspired by the private lives of women, and the external events that affect them. Like these lives, her dense, multilayered canvases defy any single interpretation. Known for her vibrant palette and recurring motifs, primarily of everyday domestic objects, Singh... "Life is like a dollhouse. We are all always playing musical chairs. Playfulness is my language, not my subject."
- ARPITA SINGH

Arpita Singh's work is frequently inspired by the private lives of women, and the external events that affect them. Like these lives, her dense, multilayered canvases defy any single interpretation. Known for her vibrant palette and recurring motifs, primarily of everyday domestic objects, Singh packs many incongruous ideas and emotions into her layered works, which draw from a wide range of allusions and influences.

Bringing her experience as a textile designer and consultant to her creative process, her canvases are bright and cheerful - reminiscent of traditional Kantha embroidery, which Singh became familiar with during her early work at the Weavers' Service Center - despite their serious themes. They often reflect the textured nature of a weave or patchwork. According to Nilima Sheikh, the artist "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. (Arpita Singh: Paintings 1992-1994, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1994)

In the present lot, Singh gives centrestage to an ageing woman who reflects on the vagaries of time and the uncertainties of the future. "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) The nude figure is surrounded by an assortment of embedded motifs as well as floating numerals, perhaps referring to the dates on a calendar or numbers on a watch. Peter Nagy writes that, "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." ("The Simplest of Means of Arpita Singh," 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 inevitability of change, and 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." (Nagy) Ella Datta adds that in Singh's work, "the ageing female body [has] emerged as one of the telling metaphors of the poignancy of the passage of time." (Cobweb, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2010, p. 9)

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