Arpita Singh
Untitled 2015 Watercolour on paper 14" x 10"
Arpita Singh is one of the few women artists in Delhi who do not make a virtue of 'feminism' as the only criterion for artistic achievement. Born in West Bengal in 1937, she had her art education at the School of Art, Delhi, and the Delhi Polytechnic, 1954-59. Since the beginning of her career Arpita has been assiduously learning the craft of painting in rhythm with her absorption of modernist reductionism. Her native paintings are unlabored particularly piquant m their comments on the 'space' of women and the girl child in the society, and on the atrophied sensibilities of modern man vis-�-vis the growing violence and social injustice. Arpita literally 'builds up' the painted surface, with. the same patient facility both in oil and watercolor. The surface tension created by the short, overlapping patches of pigments and tones is often transmitted to the surreal surprise which arise out of the continuous synchronicity of domestic objects and flower vase and aero plane, guns-, soldiers and killers hidden behind bushes in a park and men and women oblivious of corpses strewn around. She thinks with her paintings.
Between 1973 and 1993, Arpita had 12 solo shows in New Delhi, Bombay, Amsterdam and were in Germany. And in 34 years, from 1960 to 1994, she participated in 46 national and international group shows which included the Festival of India in London, at the Royal Academy of Arts, 1982, Indo-Greek Cultural Festival in Athens and Delhi, 1984, Five Indian Painters, in Istanbul, Ankara and Belgrade, in 1985, Festival of India exhibition at George Pompidou Centre, Paris, in 1986, the Second Biennale, Havana, 1987, Geneva: Coup de Coeur' Halle Sua, Switzerland, 1987. and in the same year the Algeria Biennale, Contemporary Figurative Indian Art Kuwait in 1988, Sotheby's Exhibition and Auction, New Delhi, 1992, 'India Songs' at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Sydney, in 1993, and 'Indian Encounters' in London in 1993.
She won awards in the All India Drawing Exhibition at Chandigarh in 1981 and 1992, and was awarded at the Algeria Biennial, Algeria, in 1987. In 199 1, the Sahitya Kala Parishad, New Delhi, honored Arpita Singh with 'Parishad Samman' Her works are in the collection of the National Gallery of Modem Art, New Delhi, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, Punjab University Museum, Chandigarh 'Roopankar" Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, Chester Herwitz Family Collection, USA, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and Times of India, New Delhi.
Arpita lives and works in New Delhi. courtesy of livemint.com, contemporaryindianart.com