Every painting in Arpita Singh’s debut UK exhibition feels like a desperate attempt to make sense of a tumultuous past, to memorialise the endless turbulence of life, politics and history. Singh, born in 1937, matured as an artist at a time of huge social upheaval in India. Amid states of national emergency, rising international tensions and nuclear tests, the art that came out of India after 1975 – brilliantly documented in the Barbican’s Imaginary Institution of India exhibition last year – became a way of documenting, resisting and surviving.
But Singh’s work isn’t hugely literal, nor particularly angry. Instead, her intense, colourful figurative paintings feel like a glimpse of interior life, of emotion and trauma in times of struggle. They are hugely complex, infinitely layered and filled with historical allusions, military symbolism and daily life. The paintings are stacked vertically with imagery – not laid out on a single plane like a traditional western landscape painting, but with multiple ideas piled up and across the canvas. You’re almost never looking at just one thing, one scene, but multiple images knitted together. It’s part-comic book, part-Chagall dreamscape, part-folk art.
