Meditations on the Female World Even in Somnolence

 

Arpita Singh

A significant retrospective of the well known artist Arpita Singh (born 1937), recently concluded in New Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, curated by Roobina Karode. Retrospectives usually trace an artist’s long journey, incorporating works from their multiple time periods and this, too, featured a large number of Arpita Singh’s drawings, prints and paintings spanning her long and substantial career marked by commitment and innovation.

Her concerns and explorations of the female world are not sociological-political only, they address, the female body in all stages, particularly its decline, of its sagging, flaccid flesh. Her thinking female characters do not bear the judgmental, punitive and even draconian tendencies of the male. But we mustn’t misunderstand this to mean Arpita constructs a female discourse that needs to constantly place the male in the dock. Her male characters are often, equally, victims of a violent and brutalising time – underpinned by irony and humour, her work is yet innately compassionate.

The unique pictorial language of her images is sometimes steely but tempered by compassion, mellifluous but with underlying strength – marking the confident presence of one of India’s significant modern artists.