Important Notice

Born in 1937, Arpita Singh`s deep and complex oeuvre, spanning more than four decades, is informed by and addresses the multiple histories she has witnessed and narratives she has played a part in developing, ranging from the personal to the national. Additionally, Singh’s body of figurative work is frequently inspired by the private and public lives of women, particularly her own, and by the external events that have an effect on them. Like... Born in 1937, Arpita Singh`s deep and complex oeuvre, spanning more than four decades, is informed by and addresses the multiple histories she has witnessed and narratives she has played a part in developing, ranging from the personal to the national. Additionally, Singh’s body of figurative work is frequently inspired by the private and public lives of women, particularly her own, and by the external events that have an effect on them. Like these lives, her dense, multilayered canvases defy any single interpretation.

“In the paintings of Arpita Singh, the inner space cannot be securely separated from the space of the streets. Arpita extrapolates urban experiences to create a visual noise in her work, drawing upon the excessive and the absurd. Her work is layered with tragic metaphors and her woman protagonists in their bounded domestic space are shown as vulnerable to intrusions and unwanted memories. In solitude, the cacophony of the street is amplified…and enters the domestic space. Arpita’s play on the paradox between seclusion and intrusion, the private and the public, fragility and resilience, signifies the urban catastrophe that has now become the metaphor for everyday life” (Roobina Karode and Shukla Sawant, “City Lights, City Limits – Multiple Metaphors in Everyday Urbanism”, Art and Visual Culture in India 1857-2007, Marg Publications, Mumbai, 2009, p. 203).

While they may at first appear esoteric and even stylistically naive, each of Singh’s paintings meticulously pulls together diverse motifs and strands of narrative to magically bring alive stories and experiences close to the artist’s heart. The collection of familiar objects that people her canvases, painted in vivid colours and arranged in specific patterns, and the decorative borders that hold them all in the same frame are reminiscent of comfortingly over-stuffed quilts. More specifically, they draw from the decorative idiom of Kantha embroidery, a style the artist became familiar with during her stint as a textile designer at the Weavers Service Centers in Calcutta and New Delhi.

“Memories and mappings of dislocations and discoveries, of nostalgia and pain, of excitement and anxiety have surged through her images. But Arpita Singh also responds to other dynamics in the world, to the interface between time and space, between history and present context. In fact, she absorbs the complexities of the world and represents them in her own distinct way through the sensuous use of paint and brush, signaling joy, wonder, menace and melancholy in an intricate kaleidoscope of human emotions” (Ella Datta, “Of history, context and location”, Picture Postcard, Vadehra Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2006, p. 1).

Also reading a broader context to her work, Deepak Ananth suggests that Singh’s pictures are “…about the body but not only in the familial sphere in that images of prone female figures targeted by gun-toting hoodlums must allude to the fragility of the body politic, especially in view of the widespread inter-religious violence that has wracked India over the last decade” (Deepak Ananth, “Feminine Fables”, Memory Jars, Bose Pacia Modern exhibition catalogue, 2003, not paginated).

The present lot, a monumental mural made up of sixteen individual canvas panels, is titled ‘Wish Dream’, and is the largest work created by the artist to date. Initially commissioned as a site specific project, this vivid painting found its genesis in a Tibetan play that the artist happened to be lent, in which she came across the phrase ‘wish dream’. Connecting these words with the concerns that have animated her work over the past few decades, Singh chose to focus on the subtle or understated ways in which women wield power, particularly in relation to rituals and the generation of life. Offering a nod to her source of inspiration, this work also reflects Buddhist monastic traditions in the importance that repetition plays in its imagery and design.

Executed in a vibrant palette of blues, pinks and yellows, the sixteen canvases of varying dimensions are strewn with floating flowers, vines and numbers, fragments of text, various aircraft and cars, billowing bedspreads, and nun-like female figures clad in blue, pink and white robes. Anchoring the work, however, are its two main figures, both middle-aged women who have been elevated to goddess like beings with oracular powers, and who seem to hold together and direct the rest of the painting’s diverse cast of characters and objects. Floating on cloud-like mattresses, it is these figures’ wishes and dreams that this set of sixteen canvasses brings to life for the viewer, simultaneously referring to specific lived experiences and memories, the idea of timelessness, and the unforgiving passage of time.

Drawing on familiar motifs and characters like cars, airplanes, guns and the figure of a boxer, which have appeared and reappeared in several of her works, the artist speaks of journeys that have been undertaken bringing people into and out of the protagonists’ lives, and the violence that time and aging have wreaked on their bodies, desires, aspirations and experiences. Evolving from the woman seated at the foot of the mural, Singh describes the creation of this work as an almost organic process, where each image and canvas panel unfolded from the one before it, in an ascent from the base to the apex.

Speaking about this work, art critic Uma Nair notes, “Arpita’s hallmark is her understanding of the power and poignancy of impulses; the sweep of colour begins with blue at the bottom and changes to a brilliant golden hue that speaks of ascension. The aeroplane suggests the power of destiny that brings about the inevitable, but what remains like a reverie is the memory of the associations. The flowers that lie scattered along the passage of time, have a diaphanous translucency about them, it is indeed apparent that she has learnt assiduously the craft of painting in rhythm because of her old association with textiles. While the flowers strewn along the entire border echo her understanding of the textile idiom, and the metaphoric valence of the intricate borders on the sari, it is as if the people who invade her canvasses speak of both indigenous as well as feminine tropes. The figures of the women should be read from the bottom all the way to the top, they reflect thematic concerns that are both spiritual as well as sensorial” (“Canticle of Colour”, unpublished, 2005).

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