Arpita Singh: Homeward, Selected Works 2019-2023 | 2024

Text by Ella Datta

Published by Vadehra Art Gallery, 2024

Hardcover, 59 pages

11 x 8.5 in

Described as a figurative artist and a modernist, Arpita Singh still makes it a point to stay tuned in to traditional Indian art forms and aesthetics, like miniaturist painting and different forms of folk art, employing them regularly in her work. Afflicted by the problems that are faced each and every day by women in her country and the world in general, Singh paints the range of emotions that she exchanges with these subjects - from sorrow to joy and from suffering to hope - providing a topographical view of the ongoing communication she maintains with them.

In this latest body of watercolours on paper and oil paintings, Singh's cartographical autobiographies assume new dimensions through an intensification of colour, accenting her imagined landscapes with the flourish of expressionist emotion. With compositions foregrounded in movement, Singh tends to emphasize the potential of individual agency operating within collective constraints, though her mapping doesn't seem to prioritize any one aspect - whether the fictional, mythical, personal, public fact or dream. These almost 'think-scapes' capture constructs of space in abstraction, whose protagonists occupy their frames implicitly and navigate time, cultures and history through an assemblage of connection. Her individual nostalgia evocatively intervenes in cultural narratives surrounding control, movements and freedom, especially those of women. By introducing observation points that are topographically flat, Singh personifies questions of beginning and belonging so pivotal to individual and collective journeys. The protagonists themselves emerge as part of the landscape, their internality in a state of flux as outlined by the world, however it is composed, at large.