NEW DELHI: Some critics dubbed her the female M F Husain while others saw echoes of Marc Chagall in her gravity-defying figures. But neither comparison does justice to the distinctive visual language of Arpita Singh, a pioneering post-Independence artist who died in Delhi on Monday at the age of 89.She looked like the friendly aunty next door, but her canvases were another matter. In one famous painting titled Devi Pistol Wali, a many-armed Durga holds a saree pallu, flowers and fruit, while another hand aims a revolver. My Lily Pond’s serenity is shattered by toy soldiers. Across her canvases, the macabre and the mundane, fantasy and reality, share space.
When this reporter met her at a Vadehra Art Gallery show some years ago, she had been poring over old maps and architectural drawings, studying the stars and solving crosswords. “I gather things on canvas. When I finish gathering, I start painting,” she said. She could not predict what would end up in a work. “They take a shape of their own.” Her paintings often feel like riddles, asking the viewer to follow her cryptic clues and come to their own answers. She disliked explaining her own art. “There should be a difference between what the viewer sees and what the artist paints.”Asked why her women were often middle-aged, unvarnished and un-eroticised, Singh’s answer was plain: “I don’t decide in advance whether the woman is going to be thin or fat, pretty or ugly. Anyway, glamorous women with hourglass shapes are for film and television. I paint real women.”Roobina Karode, chief curator of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, put together a retrospective of her work in 2019 to showcase the breadth of her oeuvre. “Her sharp wit, humour and provocations drew inspiration from entangled and chaotic everyday life, amplifying the pressures of contrary forces from a woman’s vantage point,” said Karode.Women were central to her work, but Singh did not treat them as symbols to be decoded. They could be vulnerable and formidable, funny, exhausted and unsettling. The 1990 Devi Pistol Wali caused quite a stir when it was published in a Durga Puja issue of Ananda Bazar Patrika.She was alert to the violence around her, and unwilling to leave it outside the studio. “We live in violent times, and as an artist, I can’t escape that,” she had said. “It stares at me from the front pages of every newspaper and the cover of every news magazine.” Her paintings could connect present-day violence to older histories, while making room for the ordinary objects that marked a life. Sofa sets, potted plants, bouquets and kitchen utensils became, in her words, “my signposts”.Born in Baranagar, Bengal, Singh moved from Calcutta to New Delhi at ten, after her father died. Her school principal persuaded her mother that her daughter’s talent for making charts could benefit from formal art training. Singh earned a diploma in fine arts from Delhi Polytechnic in 1959. In the mid-1960s, she spent four years as a designer at the Weavers’ Service Centre. The interest in textiles, pattern and embroidery shaped her art.
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In 1985, when Nalini Malani’s plan for a women-only exhibition lost its sponsors, Singh joined Malani, Madhvi Parekh and Nilima Sheikh in pooling money to stage it.In 2010, her 16-panel mural Wish Dream fetched Rs 9.56 crore at Saffronart, then a record price at auction for an Indian woman artist. She received the Padma Bhushan in 2011 and a Lalit Kala Akademi fellowship in 2014. In 2025, London’s Serpentine presented Remembering, her first institutional solo exhibition outside India. She is survived by her husband, the artist Paramjit Singh. Their artist-daughter, Anjum Singh, died of cancer in 2020.
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