Remembering draws from old memories from which
these works emerged. Whether I am aware or not, there is something happening at my core.
It is how my life flows.
Arpita Singh
Amina Kidwai with her dead husband | 1992 | Oil on canvas | 68.5" x 62"
Collection of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
Remembering at Serpentine North traces Arpita Singh’s luminous works from the 1960s to recent years, showcasing her large-scale oil paintings as well as her more intimate watercolours, ink drawings and works on paper from 1974-82 that were pivotal in laying the foundation of Singh’s oeuvre.
The exhibition presents the artist’s exploration of Surrealism, figuration, abstraction, and her inspiration from Indian miniature paintings. Since the 1990s, Singh has increasingly explored themes of motherhood, the aging female form, feminine sensuality, vulnerability, and violence, demonstrating the impact of relationships and external events on the emotional and psychological landscape of the artist. Her works are intimate portrayals of domestic and inner life but are equally concerned with the experiences of women navigating the outside world. Resisting singular interpretation, Arpita Singh explores an omnipresent tension that arises from weaving together labyrinthine cityscapes with observations of unsettling historical events and everyday life.
For Singh, memory is something inherited, both collectively experienced and deeply personal. Singh embraces shifting meaning found in the spaces of in-between, flux and unknowing. This interest in ambiguity invites viewers to bring their own meanings, curiosities, and questions to her work, free from single, fixed interpretation.
Untitled | 1981 | Paint on paper | 21.75" x 30.25"
Collection of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
For about eight years, I practiced lines and grids and repeatedly made dots and patterns. It was like practicing handwriting, she explained, before I found my voice once again.
Arpita Singh
Entering the maze-like structure that Arpita constructs in her work feels like boarding in mid journey. Not completely sure about the origin or the destination – attempting to decipher the forms, the words, one tries to coalesce them into a linear narrative, without success. The multiple layers of textured strokes, marks, stories and epiphanies submerge the viewer in a fantastical sea of Arpita’s making, just allow yourself to float free.
DT
My Mother | 1993 | Oil on canvas | 54" x 72"
Collection of Mahinder Tak
What you’re left with is a sort of beautiful chaos of memory, a vision of life where the political, personal, societal and domestic meld into one big past. That’s how we remember, isn’t it? Everything jumbled together and hopefully, in the end, quite beautiful.
The Guardian
Untitled | 1981 | Paint on paper | 27.25" x 21.5"
Collection of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
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…
...her imagery is not a direct reflection of her experiences, but an enigmatic passage wherein she works out her thoughts and emotions.
Ella Datta
As for the medium of oils, Singh knows better than most Indian painters how to use it to sumptuous effect.
Geeta Kapur
Searching Sita through Torn Papers, Paper Strips and Labels | 2015
Oil on canvas | 84″ x 114″
Collection of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
[Sita] finds herself in the atlas of Arpita’s seductive canvas of wondrous colour only to discover that the trails that lead nowhere are made up of strips of paper and labels that repeat, like a dirge. Abducted, abandoned Sita’s search, hesitate and stumble all over the atlas. Centimetre by centimetre our artist pastes together a torn, dismembering world as her protagonist waits, mourns, crouches, and holds on.
Geetanjali Shree
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, that the ultimate answer is round the next bend and yours for finding, you may well trip up.
Nilima Sheikh
Arpita Singh was born in 1937 in West Bengal, India, and moved with her family to Delhi in 1946, where she has since lived and worked. She attended School of Art, Delhi Polytechnic, and after graduating, she worked as a textile designer at the Weaver’s Service Centre, part of the Handloom Board of India.
Arpita Singh’s work has been featured in exhibitions around the world, including The Barbican Centre, London; MPlus Museum, Hong Kong; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Spain; The Serpentine Gallery, London; Museo Nacional de Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, MA; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi; Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; Turner Contemporary, England; Asia Society, New York; The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney, Australia and The Serpentine Gallery, London, UK.
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