When Arpita Singh’s Remembering opened this week at the Serpentine in London, despite being one of India’s leading artists, it was her first solo institutional show outside her native land in her six-decade-long career. It also marked the first time the Serpentine has given over its main galleries to a show by a south Asian artist. But Singh, who spends most of her waking hours in her Delhi home studio, is muted in her reaction. “Serpentine is a known gallery, so it is a prestigious thing for me,” is about as effusive as she gets.
At 87, Singh is reluctant to give her time to anything that might take her away from her canvas – and that includes this interview. Her vivid, unhinged paintings, chock-a-block with adrift figures, motifs and text often structured by narrow borders crammed with ornament, have won her a devoted following. In an epic Mappa Mundi-like piece, My Lollipop City: Gemini Rising, perspectives jar and scales switch in a way that jauntily recalls storytelling scroll paintings and lavishly detailed miniatures.
These splashy, discordant canvases are also stacked with influences from the European modernists Singh encountered during her fine art studies at Delhi Polytechnic in the late 1950s under modernist legends Biren De and Sailoz Mookherjea. “In our third year, our professor took us to the library and introduced us to western art,” Singh recalls. “I was so impressed by Der Blaue Reiter and Kandinsky. More so than the French artists.”
At the time, international art could be seen only in printed reproductions. India was a recently independent country, and although Nehru, then prime minister, had just opened the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi, it was not – and isn’t today – a space for touring shows from the west. But the little that Singh saw deepened her curiosity, and she went on to read those artists’ writings. She singles out Paul Klee as her favourite.
Forty-eight years after absorbing his written output, she finally stood face to face with his original paintings during a trip to Switzerland. The experience was revelatory. Singh tells me that she wanted to say: “Master, I have come back to you.” Klee’s influences are particularly apparent in one of Singh’s earliest watercolours, a patchwork of lightly painted shapes of colour that opens her Serpentine show. For many, this will be strikingly at odds with the figurative imagery that has made her one of India’s most highly valued female artists. Singh’s style fluctuated after art school, when she was also a consultant at the Weavers’ Service Centre, a government co-op tasked with preserving and promoting India’s textile traditions. One can see her testing different styles in off-kilter scenes where Chagall-like waywardness is crossed with surrealist eccentricity.
Being given her first solo show in the centre of Delhi by Kekoo Gandhy, an esteemed art dealer, plunged her into a period of doubt and introspection. Feeling that she was “not moving naturally on canvas” she decided to give up “painting figures” and turned to the fundamentals – dots and lines – in an effort to retrain herself. “For six years, I kept repeating these dots and lines,” she says. “It naturally became an abstract form.” When she did return to figuration, in the 1980s, the social and political experiences of a country reeling from Indira Gandhi’s imposition of emergency rule suffused her ostensibly whimsical worlds. And yet, even as Singh’s paintings make allusions to state violence, most often through the inclusion of a lurking military figure, her work from this time can seem curiously dulled and undramatic. Look closely and amid the chubby flowers and squat aeroplanes, most of her subjects seem forlorn and apathetic. As Atul Dodiya, a fellow artist who is close to Singh clarifies: “The work is superficially childlike and naive, but it comes from deep experience.”
It would be wrong, however, to consider her work an articulation only of her life. Women take up a large portion of space in her paintings, usually eclipsing men. But their colouring, often a chalky pink or pale, distances them from Singh. The goddess figure brandishing a small pistol in the painting Devi Pistol Wali is not a stand-in for Indian society. Neither is it a statement of female power in the face of victimisation. “It is nothing like that,” Singh tells me. “Why must I see her as a source of power? Neither do I see a man as a source of power. Both are the same for me.” When I gently ask her about the maternal figures that recur in her works and how her experience of motherhood (Singh’s only daughter, the artist Anjum Singh, died of cancer aged 53 in 2020) might have affected her practice, she replies with a question: “How can that change my work?”
Singh has never allowed herself to feel limited. She stayed clear of the artistic debates that consumed others such as the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group and Group 1890, and has avoided being dogmatic about her process. That might be why, over her illustrious career, she has been reluctant to speak to the press. She has, it seems, been protecting the freedom of her vision. Singh’s stimulus is varied, her practice porous and her paintings animated by their time. As Nilima Sheikh, another of India’s visionary artists who has written on Singh’s work and exhibited with her extensively, told me, Singh “has a way of seeing things completely, which I have tried to emulate”.
This comprehensive vision is fed by newspaper stories, text from books and exhibition catalogues, aspects of theatre and dance that mix with her memories. “Things happen on their own,” Singh says. “The affairs of political and social life come into my painting like the way light comes as colour and breeze comes as movement.” Ultimately, Singh is concerned with form and visual drama. And she realises these with apparent ease; her paint glides – from areas where it looks like sheets of paper to patches of thick impasto – so effortlessly that, she says, it feels as if the paintings are painting themselves.
• Arpita Singh: Remembering is at Serpentine North gallery, London, until 27 July
