Flower and it’s Shield, Detail (2020)
Talwar Gallery, New Delhi is honored to present, With you, always, an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Anjum Singh (1967-2020). The exhibition offers a rare, deeply personal view of the artist’s last two years, comprising of works made right until her passing in November 2020. With you, always demonstrates an astonishing reservoir of creative impetus and fortitude as time appears to condense for the artist. Flowing onto the surface of the paper, uninhibited, Singh maps and mirrors the vulnerability and fragility beneath her skin.
An image of three canvases lined up along a wall was one of the last works Anjum shared before her passing. The two paintings on the sides, textured and patterned like skin, flank the center canvas in which a vertical form – erased and rubbed out, bordered by golden light, stands like a darkened void of a body. The artist confronting and owning her own impending absence.
Anjum Singh has transformed personal afflictions to a more universal level of human experience in her layered images.
Ella Datta
How many holes you have in your body, Detail (2019)
The works on paper in With you, always reveal spontaneity and unrestrained frankness. Intimate yet expansive in resonance, they show a practice stripped to its essential line, mark making and the quiet charge of empty space. In them, Singh moves between intricate webs of detail and moments of sparseness, shifting from dense clusters of form to open fields. Shapes emerge that seem at once anatomical and architectural, in line with her long exploration of the relationship between city and the human body. At times, Singh employs text in her drawings, whether a humorous observation tubby chubby tummy or a poignant reflection how many holes you have in your body. The seemingly light and modest reflections, noted down, traverse enormous weight.
Singh’s interest in urban environment, systems of order and exchanges between an individual and the city informed her exploration and work for almost two decades. Starting with observations from her own surroundings of Delhi, and what was visible, on the surface. Then as urban growth challenged and strained the workings of the metropolis her interest shifted below the surface/skin to the inner mechanisms of the city and its impact on ecology and in turn its impact on us, our bodies. Transitioning from the external to the internal, her gaze shifts to her own body after a cancer diagnosis in 2014. Making her body and its supposedly broken parts, the object of her artistic attention, Singh insists on looking in and moving onwards.
I was never looking at the outside physical form—the beauty of the body or its appearance. What interested me was what lay beneath and what I was forced to confront.
Anjum Singh
“Anjum’s work looks beyond the maudlin to dissect an aspect of life that rarely gets an airing in art. Her outing of its cruelty as well as savage beauty is a reminder of the fragility of life.”
The Business Standard
“With tints, washes, daubs, stains and drips, Singh suggests the pulpy, soft mass of living flesh, the trickle of dripping discharges of body fluids, the mysterious workings of human physiology. Through this collection of paintings and works on paper, she has transformed her personal afflictions to a more universal level of human experience.”
Ella Datta
“These experiences took form on paper and canvas, not in a manner that was morbid but one that exuded a fragile beauty, holding up the frailties of the flesh to scrutiny.”
Meera Menezes
Anjum Singh was born in 1967 in New Delhi, India. As the only child of two artists, Singh 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, Washington, DC from 1992 to 1994, and was awarded the Charles Wallace Fellowship to work at Gasworks, London in 2002-2003. Her works have been shown in the Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai, India; at The San Jose Museum of Art, California; Khoj International Artists Workshop, Modinagar, India (2001); and the 7th International Cairo Biennale, Cairo, Egypt (1998). Her works are in the collection of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India. She passed away in 2020 in New, Delhi, India.
…the traditional and the modern meet in an adulterated cultural blend…Ms. Singh thrives on precisely this blend, and she is forging from it an art of visual panache and enigmatic wit.
Holland Cotter, The New York Times
