![\"Arpita](\"https:\/\/www.thehindu.com\/theme\/images\/th-online\/1x1_spacer.png\" "\\"Arpita")
<\/picture><\/div>\nKnow the artist<\/h5>\n
Arpita Singh\u2019s 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. \u201cWhen I work, I feel free,\u201d 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<\/i>. \u201cMy paintings involve procedure, and procedure keeps me occupied.\u201d One of India\u2019s most celebrated modernist painters, her art was influenced by her work with the government\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\u2014 Team Magazine<\/h5>\n<\/div>\n
An excerpt from \u2018Portrait of an Artist\u2019<\/h4>\n
Photographs by Rohit Chawla; text by Kishore Singh<\/i><\/p>\n
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\u2019s living areas in Nizamuddin East. Not many know that she is a voracious reader \u2014 \u201ceverything from William Dalrymple to Namita Devidayal\u201d \u2014 and isn\u2019t easily scared by their voluminousness, just as large paintings don\u2019t put her off, even though arthritis sometimes makes it difficult for her to squeeze the paint from paint tubes that have hardened. Sometimes, she\u2019ll 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. \u201cHe scolds me that I haven\u2019t yet finished a painting even though it\u2019s been so many days.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Arpita](\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/life-and-style\/y0e75d\/article71682498.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/Arpita%20Singh%20a.png\" "\\"Arpita")
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Arpita Singh in her studio
\n | Photo Credit:
\n Rohit Chawla\n <\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/life-and-style\/a8djop\/article71682664.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/IMG_1658_bw.jpg\" "\\"The")
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The artist photographed with her husband, artist Paramjit Singh, last year
\n | Photo Credit:
\n Rohit Chawla\n <\/p>\n
In this, her new studio in a new apartment in the same neighbourhood to which the artist couple shifted a year earlier, Arpita\u2019s work has changed, taken up almost entirely by words. The figure has been obliterated, replaced by letters. When she couldn\u2019t 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: \u2018if only you knew\u2019; \u2018road to nowhere\u2019; \u2018become something else\u2019\u2026<\/p>\n
![\"Wish](\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/life-and-style\/abdlps\/article71682502.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/doc7dyblchfn5trc71cmqp.jpg\" "\\"Wish")
<\/div>\nWish Dream<\/i><\/p>\n
A highly regarded artist, she combines the anxieties of a woman\u2019s interior world with humankind\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
![\"Arpita](\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/life-and-style\/xeupkz\/article71682499.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/GettyImages-1478769780.jpg\" "\\"Arpita")
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Arpita Singh’s Searching Sita Through Torn Papers, Paper Strips and Labels<\/i> at the 2023 Kochi-Muziris Biennale
\n | Photo Credit:
\n Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
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. \u201cWhen I work, I feel free,\u201d she says. \u201cMy paintings involve procedure, and procedure keeps me occupied.\u201d The studio then, is her place of solace.<\/p>\n
Co-published by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Mapin Publishing<\/i><\/p>\n \n \u201cShe was a painter\u2019s 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.\u201dSharan ApparaoFounder of Apparao Galleries<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \n Sharan Apparao\n <\/p>\n \n A 1998 oil on board\n <\/p>\n The writer is an artist whose lens has captured the pulse of contemporary India.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/life-and-style\/is0uu7\/article71682694.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/Black%20Minimalist%20Music%20Channel%20Youtube%20Banner.png\")
<\/div>\nGALLERISTS ON ARPITA SINGH<\/h4>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.thehindu.com\/theme\/images\/th-online\/article-quote-red.svg\"\/)
<\/p>\n![\"Sharan](\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/incoming\/goep4o\/article71682561.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/Sharan%20Apparao.jpg\" "\\"Sharan")
<\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/th-i.thgim.com\/public\/life-and-style\/wl6xan\/article71682706.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/Arpita%20surrealism.jpeg\" "\\"A")
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