IT'S WONDERFUL EXPERIENCE TO VIEW ARPITA SINGH WORKS ON PAPER

ANW I DELHI I OCT 26, 2015 I 1st Published 2000

The exhibition offers an extraordinary opportunity to view sketches, drawings and watercolours by Arpita Singh. Among India’s most outstanding artists, Singh is known for her enigmatic works, which offer a complex and highly engaging view of the world through the prism of her city, Delhi.

For the first time, 45 sketch books and about 60 drawings and watercolours are on view. These small format works which date from 1990 to 2015 provide a rare opportunity to see both the preparatory and finished works by Arpita Singh. 

Her use of the line - broken, fragmented or staccato, which may resemble a map or an ECG, offers a completely different way of viewing her works, from her highly finished paintings.

In recent times, Singh’s use of text to create forms, and the origami shapes that she has developed are also on view. The intimate format of the sketch books offer a view of the process of one of the most highly rated artists of our time.

The cornucopia of sketch books on view in the present exhibition suggest the idea of codes, maps, and the panchang, or how time seeks to make sense of space. Equally they are about eros as separate from the nude, and ambiguity as a condition of the real.

Most of all they may be about the skin and the surface, about light and how it can be closed and obscured, as if, buried under the ground. These drawing books and paintings date to the 90s, and lead us back into her work, with a kind of spiral intent, like a returning memory.

Exhibition on view from 28^th October to 2^nd December,2015.