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Lot 50

 

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Arpita Singh's paintings are informed by and address 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 frequently draws on the private and public lives of women like herself, and by the external events that act on them. Like these lives, her dense, multilayered canvases defy any single interpretation.

As... Arpita Singh's paintings are informed by and address 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 frequently draws on the private and public lives of women like herself, and by the external events that act on them. Like these lives, her dense, multilayered canvases defy any single interpretation.

As critic Holland Cotter observed, "The psychological and the political merge in paintings by New Delhi artist Arpita Singh. So do everyday life and allegory, expressionism and ornament, historical sources from Bengal folk painting to Marc Chagall, and a formal approach that is at once unassuming and hard-worked, gauche and poised" (The New York Times, 3 October, 2003).

In the present lot, a large, meditative canvas from 1996, Singh uses a palette of pastel hues to comment, from the perspective of her aging female protagonist, on the vagaries of time as well as the uncertainty of the future. Singh's subject speaks of a lifetime of fulfilling internally and externally assigned roles, from mother to wife and goddess to lover. Above the figure, a circling airplane carries people into and out of her life and memories. Images of flowers and a reclining pink woman lost in the book she is reading add a romantic thread to this tapestry, while floating fragments of text and numbers, like the woman's sagging flesh, hint at the violence of the passage of time and her fading recollections.

"As Arpita grew both as an artist and as a person, the reality of the larger world, its history and geography, began invading the play world of her picture space. Her dream-time had to make space for real time which then elided into imagined times of the past and the future. Similarly, the public sphere jostled into her private realm. The contrary pulls gave rise to some iconic paintings" ("Of Loss & Recovery", Cobweb: Arpita Singh, Vadehra Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2010, p. 6).

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