Lot 531: ARPITA SINGH (B. 1937)

ARPITA SINGH (B. 1937)
Beginning of the Festival
inscribed and titled '"BEGINNING OF THE FESTIVAL" ARPITA SINGH' (on the reverse
oil on canvas
45 x 45 in. (114.3 x 114.3 cm.)
Painted in 1972-1974

A. Jhaveri A Guide to 101 Modern & Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai, 2005, p. 84 (illustrated)

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

Arpita Singh has exhibited widely in South Asia, Europe and America in the last four decades. Belonging to the significant generation of artists working in India in the 1960s and 70s, her highly individual practices have served as a precedent for generations of artists. Singh's free-floating compositions have maintained an allegorical style that combines personal and mythical narratives which she described as 'a memory of something once known and since forgotten, like childhood or paradise'.
This painting is a seminal, early work painted between 1972 and 1974. It is a delightful composition of a seemingly staged scene, rendered in a brightly colored palette. Using playful discrepancies of scale and perspective, she invites the viewer to muse on what is seen, whilst also imagining what remains unseen. In the early seventies, Singh was painting primarily with oils and flat colors, influenced by local bazaar, folk and pop art. Thereafter, she began to explore an array of materials and forms which were derived from her interest in pattern and Kantha embroidery of Bengal.

"Arpita Singh's paintings convey the feeling of disconcerting familiarity and of quiet which is the hallmark of sensitive surrealism. In fact, the paraphernalia of her work - the imagery - is in 'suspense', strung and sprung, as it were, to change pace and sensation at the slightest emotive identification and response from the spectator. All this is reinforced with an impressive continuity and consistency of theme and imagery." (Richard Bartholomew, 1972, quoted in Arpita Singh, exhibition catalogue, Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, October, 1976)