Arpita Singh Finds Beauty Amidst Carnage

A cluster of small, lemon-yellow islands – each shaped exactly like Cuba – hovers in a milky body of water. Standing between this trio of Cubas, a soldier raises his gun, ready for combat. This straggling fighter watches as, ahead of him, a squadron of his khaki-clad brothers-in-arms attacks an array of drowning victims, their blood-red arms waving for help. Dotted throughout this scene of oceanic carnage are an unexpected array of pink blooms, leaves and trees – signs of life amidst so much trauma. Evoking a militaristic strategy board game, replete with figurine soldiers spread across a map to plan warfare, Arpita Singh’s painting My Lily Pond (2009) is at once absurd, turbulent and beautiful.

Political violence lurks in the background of several other paintings on display in ‘Remembering’, a survey of Singh’s six-decade career at Serpentine North Gallery in London. There’s the steely cool, gun-toting woman in Devi Pistol Wali (1990); the mythical battles from the Bhagavad Gita re-created in Whatever Is Here (2006); a saluting police officer in Couple Having Tea (1992). This looming hostility is no surprise given that the artist was ten years old in 1947 at the time of the Partition of India – a period marked by the displacement of millions of people as British-ruled India was split into the two independent states of India and Pakistan. Singh’s surrealist paintings maintain a sense of reality, grounded in this tumultuous experience, even as they dip into the absurd and mythological. 

The title of Golden Deer (2004), a large oil painting split across three panels, is a nod to the Hindu epic Ramayana, in which a golden deer is used to lure King Rama away, allowing a demon to abduct his wife, Sita. In Singh’s painting, the mythical creature – a symbol of desire – stands proud in the left-hand panel, protected by a wreath of luscious foliage and flowers. Rama and Sita, however, are nowhere to be seen. In their place are depictions of grotesque naked figures with protruding bones, wrinkled faces and bulging bodies, like distorted anatomical drawings. Little planes and cars coil around these figures, tying the mythology of Rama and Sita to the present day. This painting, like many others, is an eclectic collection of the various images, incohesive yet beautiful, that have captured the artist’s mind. 

On display alongside the artist’s large-scale paintings are various works on paper, beginning with her early black-and-white abstract drawings from the late 1970s. Singh later began to move towards figurative work, as in her series ‘Feminine Fables’ (1996). One of these drawings depicts a sensual older woman, wrinkles adorning her face and pollen springing from her vagina. Another lies with her legs spread, a turbine-like flower pulsing over her stomach. A third woman has blood oozing from her navel, pooling around an uncanny compass between her legs – like crimson thread winding around its spool. Singh shows rounded bellies as they lean forwards, faces locked in frowns. Across ‘Remembering’, the female figure emerges as one of Singh’s central concerns. In these works, she shows what real women can look like: old, sensual, vulnerable, powerful.

Singh has always been piecing together in her work what she knows and sees everyday: the planes flying above her head, the stories she learnt as a child, her neighbours and friends, the violence of decolonization. Still, her focus doesn’t appear to be on making political statements. Instead, it would seem, she needs to paints for herself, pouring her mind onto the canvas, brushing and washing her memories in colour. 

Arpita Singh’s ‘Remembering’ is on view at Serpentine North Gallery, London, until 27 July

^{Main image: Arpita Singh, Whatever is Here (detail), 2006, oil on canvas, 2.1 × 2.7 m. Courtesy: © Arpita Singh and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi}