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Lot 60

 

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Born in Bengal in 1937, Arpita Singh's oeuvre is marked with vibrant colours, her palette usually dominated by pinks, yellows and blues. Her paintings exude a joie de vivre, teeming with motifs from everyday life that seem to vibrate from the life force the artist invests them with. On closer examination, however, viewers find objects like guns, cars and planes sharing the frame with the artist's figures, animals, trees and flowers.
Born in Bengal in 1937, Arpita Singh's oeuvre is marked with vibrant colours, her palette usually dominated by pinks, yellows and blues. Her paintings exude a joie de vivre, teeming with motifs from everyday life that seem to vibrate from the life force the artist invests them with. On closer examination, however, viewers find objects like guns, cars and planes sharing the frame with the artist's figures, animals, trees and flowers.

The present lot is one of the works created for her solo exhibition, Memory Jars, held in New York in 2003. The title is befitting since it brings together incongruous terms, just like the combinations of common objects that find their way into Singh's paintings. These unexpected assemblages have come to define Singh's works - yielding multiple meanings through their consistent presence over the years. These motifs become alphabet-like, inviting the viewer to discover visual words of the artist's choosing. In several of the works exhibited as part of Memory Jars, she morphs her otherwise recognizable elements into symbols that reveal a different aspect of life - exposing the distress and trauma that often dwells beneath our daily lives.

Writing about the exhibition, Roobina Karode notes that "Arpita seems more engaged with lamenting the distressing reality of our times. Signs of impending doom and death rendered into compelling details catch my eye as it shifts over the works- the hanging stark bones, the drawn heart of a woman resting on her hand, the skeletal armature of the body and innards floating in the fluid painterly space, all make more than an iconic appearance…In Missing Target, she starts as usual by painting flowers that subconsciously turn into targets, in the presence of threat and proximity to death. The garlands of targets are symbolic of countless victims awaiting their fate, crouching and begging for mercy as goons point guns in all directions. The intrusive force of culture moves one as it imposes itself on nature. Perhaps hinting that if we have survived, it is simply because we are the missed targets. In this many layered work, Arpita juxtaposes the ambivalent forces of life and death- the sensuality and regeneration of life manifested in the amplified seedy fruits and the ugliness of death revealed in truncated human bodies floating in space" ("A Tapestry of Guns and Targets", Art India, Vol. VIII, Issue III, 2003, p. 51- 52).

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