‘What is a dreamlike, imaginative world to you is a real world for me.’ — Arpita Singh
“Arpita Singh: Remembering” is the first institutional solo exhibition of Arpita Singh outside of India. Spanning her six-decades long career, the show presented at the Serpentine Galleries, London, features 165 works including oil
paintings, acrylics, watercolours, ink drawings and etchings. All the works were selected with the artist herself, and display her distinctive vibrant and colourful style, skillfully used to explore the inner worlds of women.
Portrayed alone, in social circles or in streetscapes, her protagonists are accompanied by rich depictions of recurring motifs like flowers, turtles, cars and mangoes, typical of her surroundings in her homecountry and representing the cyclical nature of her artistic process. Central to her oeuvre is an exploration of surrealism, figuration and abstraction, with evident influences from Indian court painting and folk narratives.
Singh’s interest in the portrayal of the female world has increasingly focused since the 1990s on themes ranging from motherhood and female sensuality, to the aging female body, vulnerability and even violence, by looking into the impact of relationships and external events on her own emotional and psychological landscape. As seen in the spectrum of age representation in her work, Arpita Singh (b. 1937, Baranagar; based in New Delhi) is interested in time, memory and the act and significance of remembering. Singh has explained to the Serpentine that “Remembering draws from old memories from which these
works emerged, whether I’m aware of itor not, there’s something happening at my core. It’s how my life flows.’
For the artist, memory is inherited, both as collective and as deeply personal experience. Singh fluctuates between knowing and unknowing, inviting viewers to form their own questions and meanings by looking at her work, free from any fixed interpretation.
Highlights in the show include her oil on canvas Devi Pistol Wali (1990), one of her earlier depictions of women in outdoor spaces. The work demonstrates how Singh empolys Indina myths and folk stories and reimagines then in contemporary life, in order to bring attention to the complexities faced by women navigating public spaces, as well as to reflect on how our understanding of history is carried into the present. Here Singh presented an image of a woman as a many-armed Hindu goddess Devi wearing a white sari and standing on the body of a man. Holding her sari over her head with two hands, her other three hold a pistol, a flower vase and a mango. The picture is framed by a border of flowers, like traditional Indian miniatures.
A work that stands out for its more unusual technique — reverse painting — is A Feminine Tale (1995), made on the back of an acrylic sheet. It is part of a series of works created in the mid-1990s exploring a solitary female figure usually in the nude, sitting cross legged in a contemplative state. A variety of symbolic objects sit alongside the woman, like cars, flowerpots, a telephone. Here there are two profile portraits also facing each other on either side of the central figure, one reaching towards a mango. There are numbers and letters throughout, with some words spelled out like “lamp”, “telephone” or “mango”. Next to the word “Monday” there’s also an enigmatic list of numbers from 1 to 9, enriching the amount of signifiers the viewers is drawn to decipher. The work is rich in symbolism and abstraction, prompting rich interpretive potential.
Among the large-scale cityscapes on view is Singh’s intricate My Lollipop City: Gemini Rising (2005), depicting a man and a woman, arm in arm, standing amongst clouds, aeroplanes, and a bull, hovering just above a tangled street map of New Delhi, populated by a plethora of familiar and unfamiliar subjects, such as black jacketed men, buses, cars and busts of women. New Delhi monuments can be recognised among the buildings and street names — Red Fort, Humayun’s Tomb, and Jantar Mantar. As suggested in the title, horoscope references are written out on the canvas, like ‘GEMINI’, ‘TAURUS’, ‘SUN’, ‘MOON’ alongside ‘YOU ARE HERE’ as if to orient the viewer in space, as well as ‘THIS MAP IS FAULTY DO NOT FOLLOW IT’ in turn disorienting us.
Singh is keen on presenting contrasting and often contradicting words and symbols to move the act of meaning-making from artist to viewer. Looking at her vibrantly rich depictions of un/familiar scenes thus becomes an exciting challenge, a creative and intellectual exploration of a new world for the curious onlooker.
“Arpita Singh: Remembering” is on view from 20 March – 27 July 2025 at the Serpentine Galleries, London.