Arpita Singh: in the solitude of her studio

Arpita Singh in her studio in her Nizamuddin East apartment
| Photo Credit: Rohit Chawla

Know the artist

Arpita Singh’s richly detailed oils and watercolours centred women. Everyday women, affected by everyday problems, set against the backdrop of the social upheaval and humanitarian crises of her times. “When I work, I feel free,” she told writer and curator Kishore Singh in 2018, when he, along with photographer Rohit Chawla, met her in New Delhi for their book Portrait of an Artist. “My paintings involve procedure, and procedure keeps me occupied.” One of India’s most celebrated modernist painters, her art was influenced by her work with the government’s Cottage Industries Restoration Programme as a freshly minted graduate (Fine Arts from the Delhi Polytechnic), where she met traditional weavers and artisans. She later pioneered a distinct visual language that merged modernism with traditional Indian aesthetics. Over the years, her style shifted from black-and-white abstracts in the 70s to Bengali folk art, to the detailed oils she is known for in the 1990s. The Padma Bhushan awardee brought a strong feminist voice to Indian art.

— Team Magazine

An excerpt from ‘Portrait of an Artist’

Photographs by Rohit Chawla; text by Kishore Singh

Arpita Singh paints in a park-facing, light-filled room that she has sectioned off with a row of book-filled shelves, separating it from the rest of the apartment’s living areas in Nizamuddin East. Not many know that she is a voracious reader — “everything from William Dalrymple to Namita Devidayal” — and isn’t easily scared by their voluminousness, just as large paintings don’t put her off, even though arthritis sometimes makes it difficult for her to squeeze the paint from paint tubes that have hardened. Sometimes, she’ll call her husband on his phone in his studio across the wall to ask him to help her. At other times, their driver will be summoned for help. “He scolds me that I haven’t yet finished a painting even though it’s been so many days.”

Arpita Singh in her studio
| Photo Credit:
Rohit Chawla

The artist photographed with her husband, artist Paramjit Singh, last year
| Photo Credit:
Rohit Chawla

In this, her new studio in a new apartment in the same neighbourhood to which the artist couple shifted a year earlier, Arpita’s work has changed, taken up almost entirely by words. The figure has been obliterated, replaced by letters. When she couldn’t find her earlier sketches, she started making new drawings. These consisted almost completely of words, snatches of lines or phrases that she liked and wrote down in a diary: ‘if only you knew’; ‘road to nowhere’; ‘become something else’…

Wish Dream

A highly regarded artist, she combines the anxieties of a woman’s interior world with humankind’s existential threats, quite literally the guns and roses of everything from patriarchy to threats of terrorism and violence. Her drawings are dense, appearing like redacted sections of a proofreader’s text. The paintings, contrarily, are saturated with colour. Emotionally, though, they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in a nervous world continuously mired by fear of the other.

Arpita Singh’s Searching Sita Through Torn Papers, Paper Strips and Labels at the 2023 Kochi-Muziris Biennale
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images

For someone whose work reflects the apprehensive, Arpita feels freest in her studio, a place where she lets her guard down so her viewers can put theirs up. In this, the autumn of her career, she paints to keep darkness and loneliness in abeyance. “When I work, I feel free,” she says. “My paintings involve procedure, and procedure keeps me occupied.” The studio then, is her place of solace.

Co-published by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Mapin Publishing

GALLERISTS ON ARPITA SINGH

“She was a painter’s painter and inhabited a world of her own. It was the visualising in her practice that allowed us voyeurs to get a glimpse of this pictorial space that she spoke with.”Sharan ApparaoFounder of Apparao Galleries