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Lot Essay
In the works of Arpita Singh, allegory and abstraction collide to create compositions freed from the confines of naturalism. Her oeuvre is deeply marked by her time with the Weaver's Service Centres in Calcutta and Delhi. Influenced by Kantha embroidery, in which salvaged pieces of fabric are stitched together to hide the seams and unify disparate compositional elements, she moved towards alternate renderings of perspective and the use of broad, bold fields of colour.
Demonstrating the critical role textiles play in her visual vocabulary, Singh deploys the patterns of the cloth as a conceptual pivot in this painting. Here, the women's bodies meld into the cloth ground, which in turn melds into the women's bodies. The hierarchies of the image are obscured through the use of rampant patterning, which places the figures on the same footing as the textile craft. The birds wandering over the field of cloth, in turn, traipse into the psychadelic scene, and a steam ship glides across its placid surface. On the co-existence of the fantastical with the mundane in Singh's works, Ella Datta observes, "Make-believe water-lilies in lush pink, dark grey toy cars, paper boats, birds planes in the sky and plump oranges, share space with skeletal remains, gun-toting soldiers and drowning men brandishing swords. The beautiful and the bizarre, the divine and the demonic co-exist on the canvas. In the fifty years of her career as an artist, Arpita Singh's language has acquired a distinctive edge [...] Arpita has overcome the challenges of the picture space, and dexterously, yet playfully, fused reality and fantasy creating a unique idiom that is at once child-like, naive, and yet highly sophisticated in its basic idea, emotional quotient and potent structure." (E. Datta, Cobweb: Arpita Singh, exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 2010, p. 5)
Demonstrating the critical role textiles play in her visual vocabulary, Singh deploys the patterns of the cloth as a conceptual pivot in this painting. Here, the women's bodies meld into the cloth ground, which in turn melds into the women's bodies. The hierarchies of the image are obscured through the use of rampant patterning, which places the figures on the same footing as the textile craft. The birds wandering over the field of cloth, in turn, traipse into the psychadelic scene, and a steam ship glides across its placid surface. On the co-existence of the fantastical with the mundane in Singh's works, Ella Datta observes, "Make-believe water-lilies in lush pink, dark grey toy cars, paper boats, birds planes in the sky and plump oranges, share space with skeletal remains, gun-toting soldiers and drowning men brandishing swords. The beautiful and the bizarre, the divine and the demonic co-exist on the canvas. In the fifty years of her career as an artist, Arpita Singh's language has acquired a distinctive edge [...] Arpita has overcome the challenges of the picture space, and dexterously, yet playfully, fused reality and fantasy creating a unique idiom that is at once child-like, naive, and yet highly sophisticated in its basic idea, emotional quotient and potent structure." (E. Datta, Cobweb: Arpita Singh, exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 2010, p. 5)