Man Carrying Flowers

Describing Arpita Singh’s visual vocabulary as fluctuating between playful and pained, Deepak Ananth observes that in her paintings, “the poetics of free association also becomes a politics, and it is the secret tension between these registers that constitutes the enigmatic force field of Singh’s work in the last twenty years. The figure/ground gestalt becomes transposed as a chiasmus of pleasure and pain; the surface remains as delectable as ever, but the deeper structure of the paintings is keyed to motifs of desolation and death [...] Mortality stalks Singh’s pictorial world.” (D. Ananth, ‘Profound Play’, Arpita Singh, New Delhi, 2015, p. 38)