Arpita Singh’s canvases are untethered by anatomy. Figures stretch and shrink. Objects float, defying gravity. But the artist doesn’t see her work as belonging to the realm of fiction or fantasy.
“For me it’s very real,” Singh declared in conversation with Serpentine Galleries Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist earlier this year. “In dreams, mostly things aren’t under your control. Here, things are … There is a law, but that law is according to me.”
For over six decades, Singh has remade the world in her vision—men in black suits multiply, sensuality flourishes, and the humble “dot and line” receive seven years of creative study. This spring, Singh’s career will be the subject of “Remembering,” the artist’s first solo show outside her native India, opening at London’s Serpentine North Gallery on March 20.
Born in what is now the state of West Bengal in 1937, Singh didn’t foresee a life in the arts until her school principal nudged her along. “I didn’t know there was … a field called ‘art,’” she told Obrist. It wasn’t until her first year of college at Delhi Polytechnic that she visited an art museum, the National Gallery of Modern Art. Since emerging in the arts scene in the late 1960s, Singh has built a body of work that melds abstraction with traditional Indian court painting. The latter has a long history of blending the mythological and the quotidian, an enduring aspect of Singh’s work.
“Remembering” spans large-scale oil paintings, intricate watercolors, and ink drawings. Her freedom of thought permeates the expansive show, in which recurring motifs—planes, fruits, and fragmented figures—evoke what Nietzsche described as the “eternal return,” a cyclical rhythm that feels at once personal and generationally universal. “I believe, then I doubt. I believe, and I doubt again,” Singh has said. “That’s the whole process of my work.”
