
My earlier work was about the city—its skin, its surface, the damage beneath. The shift from the body of the city to my own body was very natural.
ANJUM SINGH
Flower But Not, 2015-16 Watercolor, graphite & dry pastels on paper
In 9 parts, each 32.75″ x 25.5″ x 1.5″ (detail)
Anjum Singh’s works highlight her interest in systems of order, movement, and exchange, from her early works of urban metropolises to her later works that focus on internal structures. Over the course of her career, Singh’s works transitioned from the reflection of the changing urban human condition to the changing of her own condition. Her early works explore themes of how environment shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants. After her cancer diagnosis, Singh’s works shifted to looking internally. In works such as those in Masquerade (2015), she uses gridded lines and richly patterned surfaces to map a bodily self that is at once rigidly organized and yet unpredictable—a complex architecture transformed into a living organism. And by the time of her exhibition I Am Still Here (2019), Singh brings into view the intricate systems, the currents, flows, exchanges—as well as points of breakdown—that occur continuously within this internal realm, displaying a fluid movement from fully textured canvases to ethereal, delicate forms floating on paper. Those deeply introspective depictions thus extend her long-standing concern with systems—urban or bodily—making them not only structures to be observed but experiences to be lived.
Singh invites us to look inside the body with its inscrutable materiality
ARTINDIA
The heart itself feels like a gadget. That mix of machinery and the body, the mechanical and the cellular, continues in my work.
ANJUM SINGH
Her muse was always the city - her city, which ironically, she interrogated like a body.
BUSINESS STANDARD
Anjum Singh brings a ritual of repetition to the way she painstakingly builds her surfaces.
MEERA MENEZES
Anjum Singh’s practice spanned a deep engagement with both external and internal landscapes, tracing connections between the urban environment and the body. Over time, her works shifted from explorations of the city and its ceaseless movement to intimate reflections on her own physical condition, rendered with sensitivity and resilience. Through these transformations, Singh invited viewers to consider the fragile yet vital systems that sustain life, and to look more closely at the unseen rhythms that shape our existence.
Her works have been exhibited at The San Jose Museum of Art, California; National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi, India; The Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai, India; Asian American Art Center, New York, NY and the 7th International Cairo Biennale, Cairo, Egypt. Her works are in the collection of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi, India.
Anjum Singh was born in 1967 in New Delhi, India. As the only child of artists Arpita and Paramjit Singh, Anjum was surrounded by art from an early age. In 1989 she earned a BFA at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, before receiving an MFA from College of Art, New Delhi in 1991. Later she continued her education at The Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C., when she took courses on printmaking and painting between 1992–94, she began to incorporate organic forms, colors, and textures into her paintings. In 2002, she received the Charles Wallace Fellowship, and took a year-long artist residency at Gasworks, London. After a six-year-long battle with cancer, she passed away in 2020 in New, Delhi, India.