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Lot 63

 

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Arpita Singh's watercolors utilize her unique compositional schemes to explore the intimacies and exigencies of everyday life. The works, incorporating visuals that depict domestic life, also intend to allude to the unpleasant realities that lie beneath the benign façade of happy familial relationships. A first glance at these intimate works invites an understanding that the image celebrates the simple joys of everyday living. Common objects... Arpita Singh's watercolors utilize her unique compositional schemes to explore the intimacies and exigencies of everyday life. The works, incorporating visuals that depict domestic life, also intend to allude to the unpleasant realities that lie beneath the benign façade of happy familial relationships. A first glance at these intimate works invites an understanding that the image celebrates the simple joys of everyday living. Common objects such as chairs, flowers, teapots and utensils, a decorative mat, bring joy and calm through the process of shared recognition. The arrangement of these disparate elements on paper does not necessarily follow a set visual pattern - assigning a dreamlike quality to the work that is further enhanced by the stippling brushstrokes employed by the artist to fill the scenes with vibrant colours.

The human figures interspersed with the objects, however, generate an uneasy feeling. Rendered with stark and often somber expressions, with sagging and marked skin, they seem like misfits amidst the colourful teapots and flowers. A closer look brings to fore the private burdens of these mature adults - the man lifelessly sitting on a chair while the woman stands, her hand tensely resting on the other elbow, contemplating each other and the situation they seem to share. Their scale seems to diminish the festive rendition of the objects around them, further challenging the myth of a safe domestic haven untouched by problems.

Writing about Singh's practice over the decades, Ella Dutta comments, "In the fifty years of her career as an artist, Arpita Singh's language has acquired a distinctive edge. As she has evolved as an artist, Arpita has overcome the challenges of the picture space and dexterously, yet playfully, fused reality and fantasy creating a unique idiom that is at once child-like, naïve, and yet highly sophisticated in its basic idea, emotional quotient and potent structure" (Ella Dutta, Cobweb, Vadehra Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2010, p. 5).

"Certain undercurrents seen in Arpita's paintings over the decades have gathered force from the year 2000 onwards. Her sensibilities, which shaped her images, have been tinged with her childhood memories of loss, dislocation and journeys. Buried deep in her subconscious is the experience of a fractured reality of her early childhood. Meanwhile the poignancy of her youth slipping away had triggered another rising tide of melancholy. And to be able to negotiate the acute sense of loss that is layered within her being, as an artist, she has begun mythologizing the reality that she experienced - at first a personal mythology and then she appropriated the myths of the community"(Ibid.).

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