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Lot 41

 

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Though Arpita Singh’s paintings continued to maintain their child- like idiom, by the mid-1990s, they increasingly began to reflect on the widespread brutality and violence of the wider world and their effects on an individual’s psyche. The present lot portrays a funeral and evokes a sense of loss and a haunting isolation as well as a larger commentary on grief, death, and the passage of time. Singh adds layers of meaning to her figures through... Though Arpita Singh’s paintings continued to maintain their child- like idiom, by the mid-1990s, they increasingly began to reflect on the widespread brutality and violence of the wider world and their effects on an individual’s psyche. The present lot portrays a funeral and evokes a sense of loss and a haunting isolation as well as a larger commentary on grief, death, and the passage of time. Singh adds layers of meaning to her figures through carefully considered compositional placement and differences in scale. The body of a man who has recently died looms large over the pictorial plane while a woman in white, possibly his widow, mourns in isolation in the opposite corner. They are surrounded by other mourners who have been reduced to the level of objects having been delineated in a smaller scale compared to the man and woman. Numbers, letters and symbols like planes and clocks evoke a sense of the temporal and embody “comings and goings, the inevitability and implicit danger of separation and reunion, and the inescapability of death. She makes the past and faraway co-present, in the anticipation of separation, by travel or death.” (Susan Bean, “Now, Then, Beyond, Time in India’s Contemporary Art”, Contemporary Indian Art, Other Realities, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2002, p. 54)

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