It flows like blood, 2020, Watercolor on paper, 33" x 25.5"
I can’t forget seeing Anjum Singh, radiant and smiling in 2019, at her last show, “I am still here,” after she miraculously survived a brush with death earlier that year. But her elation was short-lived; she lost her battle with cancer in 2020 at age fifty-three. This posthumous exhibition, “With you, always,” brings together works from the last two tumultuous years of her life alongside paintings created following her initial cancer diagnosis in 2014.
Singh never consciously intended to make her ill health the subject of her work. Yet the manifold references to blood and bodily organs in her works on paper and canvas tie back to her experiences of scans, invasive tests, and radiation. In paintings such as Stain, 2015; Bloom, 2016; and Flower and it’s Shield, 2020, smudges of red are reminiscent of blood samples but equally of efflorescence. Pain is writ large in It flows like blood, 2020, with its dripping red paint, and Ebb and Flow, 2015–18, a suite of ten works in watercolor, silver pigment, and graphite on paper marked with bursts of crimson. But Singh could be equally detached, reducing her afflicted body to a mere number, as evident in the title Quality Claim No. 48130021, 2015. This ability to be both subjective and objective marked her work in the penultimate years of her life.
In stark contrast to these evocative small works, with their motifs enshrined in swaths of empty space, her large canvases are a densely wrought weave of textures. Employing corrugated cardboard to make imprints onto canvas, the artist produced richly patterned surfaces in Still Life, 2017, and Bleed Bled Blood Red, 2015. In the latter, three bright-red hearts punctured with holes and set amid dark-green foliage occupy center stage. Singh often resorted to stencils to create circular shapes on the surface of her canvases, a repetitive act she found meditative. The stenciled words BLOOD BUBBLE surround a gigantic red orb covered in mesh in a 2014 painting of that title. These oils attest to Singh’s innate love for structure and control, which she evidently relinquished in her later works on paper, as evident in the bleeding watercolors.
The subtitle of the series “Untitled (The Skin Remembers),” 2019–20, conjured up memories of Singh’s solo exhibition of that name in 2010. She had stumbled upon the sentence “The skin remembers” in one of John Updike’s short stories. In the show, she underscored that the cityscape, much like skin, often bears marks of events that have long since faded from memory. The city, beset by manifold ills, appears to have tragically prefigured Singh’s own bodily condition toward the end of her life.
Several works on display, Pandemic, 2020; Lockdown, 2020; and Different Strains, 2020, pointed to Singh’s preoccupation with the covid pandemic. She must have been acutely aware of her heightened vulnerability to infection given her weakened immune system. In Virus, 2020, a dark globular mass unfurling its tentacles obviously points to the virus but could equally be an analogy for her cancerous body cells going on a rampage. Yet her work always retained a hard-won sense of humor. She pokes fun at herself and her body in Bottom Hose, 2016, and Tubby chubby tummy, 2020. Untitled (Self Portrait), 2020, depicts Singh smiling, despite a crisscross of lines threatening to disfigure and obliterate her. It is a poignant reminder that her indomitable spirit is with us always.