“Images in which the comic and the tragic seem interchangeable, are characteristic of work that has made Ms. Singh one of the best-known contemporary artists in India. They are also evidence of an art gradually darkening in tone and lightening in form, a rewarding way to go in this remarkable painter's hands.”

The New York Times

A dreamlike logic liberates familiar, everyday objects from the rules of reality, transforming them into symbols which evade interpretation... Arpita Singh’s paintings further capture the tenuous line separating an ever-shifting landscape and the sanctum of home. They consider whether the home can remain a refuge, immune from the surrounding disturbances, the landscapes in motion. Collectively, however, these works demonstrate that life must continue despite and within these contested terrains.

Shanay Jhaveri

Much of Arpita's work, world, and ideology is
history compressed into fables and allegories;
what we witness are diverse imaginaries.

Geeta Kapur
 

Look for secret trapdoors and open sesame codes if you like, but mind you, if you begin to think the meaning is more important than the game or that the ultimate answer is round the next bend and yours for the finding, you may well trip up. An entry may mean a maze or a cul-de-sac. Many beginnings and no end.

Nilima Sheikh 

“All works of art, whether it is a book, a song or a painting, are mirrors. In a way, the artist shows you the mirror and you see yourself in it.”

Arpita Singh

 

The rhythms of repetition form structure and continuity within her paintings and between them.

Deepak Ananth

Singh’s recent paintings with their birds eye view could be apprehended as a response to and even shaped by the rise of the internet and the globalisation that has taken place in the first two decades of the 21st century. What she seems to be aiming for like fellow painters Julie Mehretu and Mark Bradford is to make visible through her cartographic depictions what remains unseen—certain power structures and apparatuses that are guiding and shaping the existing order of the world.

Shanay Jhaveri

"They have the personal modesty of notebook entries in which recurrent dreams are jotted down..."
THE NEW YORK TIMES

"Arpita Singh achieves a richness in suggestion through the repetition of images as multiple reflections or as a system of inner rhymes so the self-same motifs in different positions or different relationships take on a different connotation..."
EBRAHIM ALKAZI

 

“Singh, who thinks of herself as a detached observer of the grand spectacle of life has shown in her art a driving urge to understand reality and the intangible rhythms that lie behind giving it shape and substance.”
ELLA DATTA
 

"Sometimes stained or slightly battered, the drawings show their age proudly. This is art, after all, that survived the intensity of its own turbulent making."
BARRY SCHWABSKY

“...intense, colourful figurative paintings feel like a glimpse of interior life, of emotion and trauma.”
THE GUARDIAN