Last year, the work of Arpita Singh featured in The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998, a survey at The Barbican of artistic production from across the Indian subcontinent during a 23-year period marked by social upheaval, economic instability and rapid urbanisation. The artists featured all combined social observation with individual expression and innovative forms to make work about friendship, love, desire, family, religion, violence, caste and community.
Singh has worked with these themes across her career through works drawing on Surrealism, abstraction, folk art, and collage. She incorporates influences from Indian court paintings and India’s folk narratives in paintings focusing on themes of motherhood, the ageing female form, feminine sensuality, and vulnerability, alongside representations of violence and political unrest in India and internationally. She has said that, “The affairs of political and social life come into my painting like the way light comes as colour and breeze comes as movement.”
Although her work has been seen in the UK previously, as this is the first institutional solo exhibition of her work in London, many of those viewing the exhibition have the opportunity to view the six-decade career of a major artist unencumbered by prior knowledge or critical commentary. As such, the work has an unusual opportunity to speak for itself.
Singh emerged in the 1960s with a painting practice that combines Surrealism and figuration with Indian Court painting narratives. However, this initial style proved insufficient in terms of mark-making, and she had a six-year period of abstraction, during which she used pen, ink, and pastels to form dynamic lines and perforations on the surface to create layers and textures. When she returned to figuration, her mark-making had become intuitively gestural and expressionist, bringing a greater sense of depth and movement to images that retained her interest in the surreal through juxtapositions of characters and artefacts in ways that resonate with the work and worlds of Paul Klee and Marc Chagall.
‘Munna Apa’s Garden’ is a striking work in this new style. In this work, the home and garden of a neighbour blend and merge. Domestic scenes and objects ring and encroach on the central garden area where Munna Apa is working, as do the planes and cars that feature in much of her work. This imaginative intertwining of interior and exterior is symptomatic of much folk art but is indicative of work which shows the distinctive impact of local, national, and global events on the psychology of her characters, particularly women, including those within her own social network.
Images such as ‘Manjit and a Friend Talking’ and ‘Party at Ram Sharma’s House’ continue the theme of celebrating ordinary life. However, alongside these positive works, strands of institutional violence also encroach on the experience of widowed women in particular, as in ‘Threat’. This element within her work explodes (literally) in ‘My Mother’, a painting made in the context of the intercommunal massacres that erupted in Bombay following the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992. As Geetanjali Shree describes: “The entire canvas is used up to detail the horrors of violence and devastation, except for its bottom right corner, where stands erect the old Mother in her widow’s white, a witness of our times, while she herself is from another. Pensive and resolute, she has turned her back on the warring mad world.” The image is framed by text challenging the viewer in terms of what they say about such incidents and when they keep silent.
As Singh’s work becomes more explicitly focused on societal violence, so text also begins to feature, leading ultimately to a use of text within the works which is collage-like and linked to the text of current affairs as with ‘The Listeners’, which depicts a man reading from a newspaper to a group of people listening. Other recurring devices include the use of maps, as with ‘My Lollipop City: Gemini Rising’, which is a depiction of frenetic activity across the artist’s home city of Delhi that also extends into the heavens with depictions of Taurus and Gemini. Imagery of the Golden Deer also emerges as a significant strand within the later works. This image is drawn from the epic poem Ramayana, in which the golden deer represents the unattainable desires, allure, and temptation that lead Sita to request its capture, a request that ultimately results in her being kidnapped. The image of the Golden Deer, therefore, emphasises the folly of chasing illusions.
The’ Golden Deer’ and ‘Searching Sita through Torn Papers, Paper Strips and Labels’ bring all these strands together in images which, as Geeta Kapur writes, explode with warfare in “planetary wars that will annihilate the universe” and which leave “armies of kith and kin slaughtered on home ground”. The search for unattainable desires, as symbolised in The Golden Deer, is the catalyst for the violence covering the text-based maps that form the torn and dismembered worlds depicted in these works. These large works are major statements about mimetic desire and our human tendency to create and punish scapegoats.
While these are important and substantial works, the majority of Singh’s work is focused on the domestic and relational, where a different, more positive, but equally powerful dynamic is to be found. The collection of works on paper that fill the two interconnecting galleries at Serpentine North finds its primary focus here.
However, I want to end with two images that straddle Singh’s focus on home and her focus on societal violence. In ‘Homeward’, she forms the sea, on which a small black boat floats, from a collage of the words, ‘boat’, ‘paper boat’ and ‘want to go home’. The exhibition’s curator, Tamsin Hong, notes that “the person or people contemplated in this work are … absent”. She suggests that this beautiful image asks a profound question, “whether the person not painted is returning home, if they are on their way to a new home, or if they are stranded and unable to go home?” The boat, she suggests, “may point to the millions of people displaced by war including those making perilous journeys across seas”. ‘Can’t Go Back Home This Way’ deals with a similar situation but is set in the context of domestic violence. A single figure sits cross-legged in a classic contemplative pose with a halo around the head. Yet, the face and body of this individual are formed of words describing the horror of domestic violence, and the halo spells out the work’s title in the message: ‘Lord, I can’t go back home this way’.
In works like these, the artist becomes one with those most at risk in a world where the search for unattainable desires constantly provokes violence. In this way, she becomes an everywoman within her work: “I know that when the work grows, the starting point melts, references become signals to lead anybody or everybody to the desired place. I don’t remember myself, the frame breaks and I, the woman, stand there as anybody, as everybody.”
‘Arpita Singh: Remembering’, 20 March – 27 July 2025, Serpentine North