Arpita Singh

Singh’s paintings of the late 1980s through the 1990s portray older Indian women with brutal honesty. Many works feature a lone female nude, exposed and floating against a colored background. In The Ritual and The Eternal Repose, the female body dominates the canvas, the rolls and wrinkles of her flesh softening her forms while forcing the viewer to confront her sheer physical reality. The Ritual is particularly enigmatic in composition, with its unexpectedly pink bodies enacting an almost aggressive but undefined ritual. At the right edge of the work, a phrase, “In the beginning the earth was a square,” is overlaid onto a strip of river or ocean and hints at a kind of primordial setting. In The Eternal Repose, Singh renders her female figure at almost the same miniature scale as the domestic objects floating around her. The multiarmed woman reaches toward a series of figures, alluding to the juggling of multiple relationships with family and friends that the modern Indian woman has to maintain. The reclining pose also recalls that of the god Vishnu, the protector, since the modern mother figure has to protect and nurture her family and the domestic realm. In Amina Kidwai, Singh paints a woman who was her neighbor for many years and grew to become a close friend. The work depicts Amina and probably her husband at tea, surrounded by a floating array of plants, flowers, teacups and a teapot, and birds. Amina’s daughter Ayesha was the frequent subject of Singh’s paintings during the 1990s. This younger woman, despite family opposition, married outside her community, bringing to the surface traditional conflicts between religions, cultures, and genders. The artist has spoken of how this family seems to her like a microcosm of contemporary India with not only its diversity but also its fractures.

Supported by Peter Louis and Chandru Ramchandani.