JOIN USOne of the most prominent women artists of her generation, Arpita Singh has been a trailblazer in many ways.
Born in West Bengal in 1937, Arpita had her art education at the School of Art, Delhi, and the Delhi Polytechnic. In a career spanning over four decades, the Delhi-based artist has had innumerable solo and group shows in India and abroad.
Her paintings are marked by a unique understanding and representation of the female form and condition. With vibrant colours and teeming forms and motifs including cars, airplanes, animals, trees and flowers, Arpita regales her viewers with a peculiar combination of figurative, modernist and traditional or folk aesthetic.
“Arpita has pushed the visual lexicon of the middle-aged woman further than almost any other woman artist,” says art critic Gayatri Sinha.
“The anomaly between the aging body and the residue of desire, between the ordinary and the divine, and the threat of the violent fluxes of the impinging external world gives her work its piquancy and edge. At the same time, she critiques the miasma of urban Indian life with suggestive symbols of violence that impinge on the sphere of the private, creating an edgy uncertainty.”
Winner of the prestigious Kalidas Sanman (1998-99) and Padma Bhushan (2011), Arpita made history in 2010 when her monumental mural based on Tibetan Buddhist monastic traditions fetched Rs 9.6 crore, the highest price achieved globally by an Indian woman artist at an auction.
The painting titled ‘The Wish Dream’ — a 16 panel mural sized 24 ft x 13 ft — executed by Arpita in 2001, sold for $2.24 million at the Saffronart international online auction in 2010.
The artist who is married to co-artist Paramjit Singh, however, remains unruffled by the hype surrounding the auction records for her paintings.
Art lovers will have an opportunity to interact with the veteran artist at IAF 2015 when Vadehra Art Gallery will present a session with Arpita at the YES Bank Spotlight Series at 5.30 pm on January 30.
She will be in conversation with Deepak Ananth (Art historian and author) and Chaitanya Sambrani (historian and curator). Incidentally, Ananth is an art historian based in Paris; and Sambrani teaches at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory — School of Art, The Australian National University, Canberra.