Latest news with #ArpitaSingh
&w=3840&q=100)
Business Standard
5 days ago
- Business
- Business Standard
India's top women artists: 87-yr old Arpita Singh tops with Rs 23 cr sales
The 2025 Candere Hurun India Women Leaders List not only celebrates business acumen and philanthropic spirit but also shines a vibrant light on a powerful collection of women artists who are profoundly reshaping the contemporary Indian art landscape. With their combined turnover exceeding Rs 40 crore, these artists are not just creators of beauty; they are cultural architects, transcending traditional gallery spaces and market dynamics to spark crucial conversations on identity, history, and the intricate tapestry of human experience. Through their diverse styles and compelling narratives, they are painting and sculpting the future of creativity and innovation in India. Leading this illustrious group is Arpita Singh (87, Delhi), a remarkable figure who transitioned from banking to become a modernist painter. Her figurative storytelling continues to captivate, achieving an astounding total sales figure of Rs 22.9 crore. Singh's artistic prominence is underscored by the sale of six lots of her artwork, with her most expensive painting, "Watching" (2004), significantly contributing to her status as a leading contemporary artist. With a combined turnover exceeding INR 40 crore, they are not merely creating art; they are shaping the future of creativity and innovation. Joining her in the realm of figurative expression are other formidable talents: Bharti Kher (56, Delhi), generating Rs 4.7 crore, masterfully uses the bindi as a contemporary political statement, delving into themes of transformation, identity, and gender. Anjolie Ela Menon (84, Delhi), with Rs 3.7 crore, crafts ethereal figures, influenced by Renaissance art, that reflect profound themes of solitude and memory, often drawn from her childhood in Bengal. Celia Paul (65, London), achieving Rs 1.3 crore, offers intimate portraits of herself, her mother, family, and her lover, exploring self-identity and solitude with a delicate touch. Rekha Rodwittiya (66, Vadodara), grossing Rs 0.4 crore, channels her powerful feminist activism directly onto her canvases, depicting not just women but their inherent struggles and unwavering resilience. Beyond figurative narratives, a cohort of artists pushes boundaries into abstraction and innovative forms: Nalini Malani (78, Mumbai), with an impressive Rs 4 crore turnover, is a trailblazer in abstraction. She pushes artistic boundaries with immersive installations and video art, powerfully addressing war, displacement, and violence against women, deeply shaped by her experiences during the Partition. Arpana Caur (70, Delhi), generating Rs 1 crore, distinctively fuses historical themes with contemporary social issues in her abstract works, often drawing inspiration from Sikh traditions. Madhvi Parekh (83, Delhi), also at Rs 1 crore, seamlessly blends folk traditions with modern abstraction, using her instinctive approach to express themes from childhood memories and storytelling. The list also celebrates sculptors who bring unique perspectives to their craft: Ranjani Shettar (48, Bengaluru), earning Rs 0.9 crore, creates captivating abstract sculptures that ingeniously combine manmade and natural materials, including wood, beeswax, cloth, thread, rubber, PVC pipe, wire, steel, and beads. Jayashree Chakravarty (69, Kolkata), also with Rs 0.9 crore, infuses ecological consciousness into her layered canvases, reflecting the fragility of nature amidst rapid urbanization.
Hindustan Times
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Drawing Room: Ritika Aurora loves how Arpita Singh uses pink
Arpita Singh's vibrant, vivid oil paintings often focus on female figures traversing the vagaries of age and the weight of societal expectations. She uses bright colours and packs her visuals together to cover every inch of her canvas, taking inspiration from Indian miniature. This is in stark contrast to the Western concept of showcasing depth through perspective and the strategic placement of figures. And yet, Western abstractionist movements such as Surrealism are also evident in her work.
The Guardian
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I spent six years just repeating dots and lines': the great painter Arpita Singh on a lifetime in art
When Arpita Singh's Remembering opened this week at the Serpentine in London, despite being one of India's leading artists, it was her first solo institutional show outside her native land in her six-decade-long career. It also marked the first time the Serpentine has given over its main galleries to a show by a south Asian artist. But Singh, who spends most of her waking hours in her Delhi home studio, is muted in her reaction. 'Serpentine is a known gallery, so it is a prestigious thing for me,' is about as effusive as she gets. At 87, Singh is reluctant to give her time to anything that might take her away from her canvas – and that includes this interview. Her vivid, unhinged paintings, chock-a-block with adrift figures, motifs and text often structured by narrow borders crammed with ornament, have won her a devoted following. In an epic Mappa Mundi-like piece, My Lollipop City: Gemini Rising, perspectives jar and scales switch in a way that jauntily recalls storytelling scroll paintings and lavishly detailed miniatures. These splashy, discordant canvases are also stacked with influences from the European modernists Singh encountered during her fine art studies at Delhi Polytechnic in the late 1950s under modernist legends Biren De and Sailoz Mookherjea. 'In our third year, our professor took us to the library and introduced us to western art,' Singh recalls. 'I was so impressed by Der Blaue Reiter and Kandinsky. More so than the French artists.' At the time, international art could be seen only in printed reproductions. India was a recently independent country, and although Nehru, then prime minister, had just opened the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi, it was not – and isn't today – a space for touring shows from the west. But the little that Singh saw deepened her curiosity, and she went on to read those artists' writings. She singles out Paul Klee as her favourite. Forty-eight years after absorbing his written output, she finally stood face to face with his original paintings during a trip to Switzerland. The experience was revelatory. Singh tells me that she wanted to say: 'Master, I have come back to you.' Klee's influences are particularly apparent in one of Singh's earliest watercolours, a patchwork of lightly painted shapes of colour that opens her Serpentine show. For many, this will be strikingly at odds with the figurative imagery that has made her one of India's most highly valued female artists. Singh's style fluctuated after art school, when she was also a consultant at the Weavers' Service Centre, a government co-op tasked with preserving and promoting India's textile traditions. One can see her testing different styles in off-kilter scenes where Chagall-like waywardness is crossed with surrealist eccentricity. Being given her first solo show in the centre of Delhi by Kekoo Gandhy, an esteemed art dealer, plunged her into a period of doubt and introspection. Feeling that she was 'not moving naturally on canvas' she decided to give up 'painting figures' and turned to the fundamentals – dots and lines – in an effort to retrain herself. 'For six years, I kept repeating these dots and lines,' she says. 'It naturally became an abstract form.' When she did return to figuration, in the 1980s, the social and political experiences of a country reeling from Indira Gandhi's imposition of emergency rule suffused her ostensibly whimsical worlds. And yet, even as Singh's paintings make allusions to state violence, most often through the inclusion of a lurking military figure, her work from this time can seem curiously dulled and undramatic. Look closely and amid the chubby flowers and squat aeroplanes, most of her subjects seem forlorn and apathetic. As Atul Dodiya, a fellow artist who is close to Singh clarifies: 'The work is superficially childlike and naive, but it comes from deep experience.' It would be wrong, however, to consider her work an articulation only of her life. Women take up a large portion of space in her paintings, usually eclipsing men. But their colouring, often a chalky pink or pale, distances them from Singh. The goddess figure brandishing a small pistol in the painting Devi Pistol Wali is not a stand-in for Indian society. Neither is it a statement of female power in the face of victimisation. 'It is nothing like that,' Singh tells me. 'Why must I see her as a source of power? Neither do I see a man as a source of power. Both are the same for me.' When I gently ask her about the maternal figures that recur in her works and how her experience of motherhood (Singh's only daughter, the artist Anjum Singh, died of cancer aged 53 in 2020) might have affected her practice, she replies with a question: 'How can that change my work?' Singh has never allowed herself to feel limited. She stayed clear of the artistic debates that consumed others such as the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group and Group 1890, and has avoided being dogmatic about her process. That might be why, over her illustrious career, she has been reluctant to speak to the press. She has, it seems, been protecting the freedom of her vision. Singh's stimulus is varied, her practice porous and her paintings animated by their time. As Nilima Sheikh, another of India's visionary artists who has written on Singh's work and exhibited with her extensively, told me, Singh 'has a way of seeing things completely, which I have tried to emulate'. This comprehensive vision is fed by newspaper stories, text from books and exhibition catalogues, aspects of theatre and dance that mix with her memories. 'Things happen on their own,' Singh says. 'The affairs of political and social life come into my painting like the way light comes as colour and breeze comes as movement.' Ultimately, Singh is concerned with form and visual drama. And she realises these with apparent ease; her paint glides – from areas where it looks like sheets of paper to patches of thick impasto – so effortlessly that, she says, it feels as if the paintings are painting themselves. Arpita Singh: Remembering is at Serpentine North gallery, London, until 27 July
The Guardian
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Arpita Singh: Remembering review – beautiful chaos reigns in India's tumultuous past
Every painting in Arpita Singh's debut UK exhibition feels like a desperate attempt to make sense of a tumultuous past, to memorialise the endless turbulence of life, politics and history. Singh, born in 1937, matured as an artist at a time of huge social upheaval in India. Amid states of national emergency, rising international tensions and nuclear tests, the art that came out of India after 1975 – brilliantly documented in the Barbican's Imaginary Institution of India exhibition last year – became a way of documenting, resisting and surviving. But Singh's work isn't hugely literal, nor particularly angry. Instead, her intense, colourful figurative paintings feel like a glimpse of interior life, of emotion and trauma in times of struggle. They are hugely complex, infinitely layered and filled with historical allusions, military symbolism and daily life. The paintings are stacked vertically with imagery – not laid out on a single plane like a traditional western landscape painting, but with multiple ideas piled up and across the canvas. You're almost never looking at just one thing, one scene, but multiple images knitted together. It's part-comic book, part-Chagall dreamscape, part-folk art. In one early painting, a woman tends to her garden as a mother nurses her child. People drive by in cars, a kid peers around a curtain and a figure sleeps while jets fly overhead. Perspectives don't make sense and picture planes clash, but it all coalesces into a gorgeous world of blue, a portrait of female care and tenderness in the hectic hustle of urbanity. That battle between inner life and sociopolitical reality plays out across all the best works here. A couple takes tea in front of a saluting soldier, a multi-armed Kali-esque woman fights off a bureaucrat with a gun while balancing on a sleeping man. Everywhere you look there are the same images, repeated over and over like memories looping back: flowers, cars, soldiers, bureaucrats in black, looming men and countless women. The women matter here because they nurture, care and provide in a world that otherwise seems hellbent on chaos and violence. This comes out most clearly in watercolours from the 1990s: psychedelic visions of motherhood and femininity that are gorgeously tender and vulnerable. And even though the bigger paintings until about 2002 are the stars of the show, the works on paper are great, clearer and more concise than the paintings but still full of Singh's hallmarks. Works from the past 20 years take a more collage-like approach, creating big patchy canvases plastered with words, human figures and strips of clashing colours. There are references to war, conflict, displacement, nods to Indian epics – they're interesting paintings, but most of them are just splotchy, semi-abstract and incoherent, and don't convey her ideas or aesthetic as well as the earlier pieces. While they're not great, maybe that makes sense with the theme of the show. Maybe it reflects how your memory frays and splinters, how images increasingly struggle to coalesce in your mind's eye. There is a lot here that will go over the heads of a non-Indian audience, and a lot that goes largely unexplained. There are just so many references to folk art, Indian court painting and current events that aren't so current any more. Trying to figure it all out can leave you feeling a little delirious. But Singh wants viewers to take the work at face value, to interpret it for themselves. So what you're left with is a sort of beautiful chaos of memory, a vision of life where the political, personal, societal and domestic meld into one big past. That's how we remember, isn't it? Everything jumbled together and hopefully, in the end, quite beautiful. Arpita Singh: Remembering is at Serpentine North gallery, London, until 27 July.
The Guardian
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The inner life of India, Warhol's America and the Munch bunch – the week in art
Arpita Singh: RememberingFirst major UK exhibition for this veteran Indian painter of modern life. Serpentine North, London, from 20 March until 27 July Edvard Munch PortraitsThis great painter of inward states turns his eye on external appearances in a survey of his portraits. National Portrait Gallery, London until 15 June Andy Warhol: Portrait of AmericaThe excellent Artist Rooms collection offers up its holdings of the Popfather. MK Gallery, Milton Keynes from 15 March until 29 June Towering Dreams Romantic visions and follies in architectural drawings from Sir John Soane's Museum. Compton Verney, Warwickshire from 15 March until 31 August A World of WaterHow the sea – especially East Anglia's 'local' North Sea – has been depicted in art from the 1600s to now. Sainsbury Centre, UEA, Norwich from 15 March until 3 August Having fled war in Eritrea at 16 Ficre Ghebreyesus, who died in 2012, said painting gave him back his life. His vertiginous paintings celebrate family, the diaspora and his own turbulent story and his first European solo exhibition charts this remarkable journey. Read the full story Ceramicist Carol McNicoll, who gave everyday objects a surreal twist, died aged 81 Fifty years in 14th-century Siena in Italy may not sound electrifying, but it is The Pompidou Centre in Paris is beginning work on a €262m refit Sylvie Fleury gives Matisse's drawings and cutouts a modern punk twist Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan are demystifying 'the idea of art as an individual pursuit' Painter Celia Paul says the YBA era was a party 'I was definitely excluded from' William S Burroughs regretted shooting his wife but still made art with guns Salisbury Cathedral and Leadenhall from the River Avon by John Constable, 1820 The place is placid, the brushwork stormy. This is an oil sketch, painted on the spot, in the open air, more than 50 years before the launch of impressionism. French artists and art lovers were in fact among the first to see Constable's originality. Modest and conservative in his life and views, this painter from Suffolk simply put his canvas in front of nature and painted what he saw – but in doing so daubed his feelings. He was staying in Salisbury in 1820 as a guest of the bishop. In his eyes the peaceful cathedral environs become charged with energy and passion. Every puff of grey cloud and each dappled tree seems wrenched from the palette of his heart. It may seem gentle but this is a masterpiece of the Romantic age, poetically connecting the outward mystery of nature and time (symbolised by the centuries-old spire) with the inward state of the artist. National Gallery, London If you don't already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
