Running the city

Lalit Kala Akademi, Gallery no-5, is all set to present Shadow Journal, an ensemble of twenty of Sangeeta Singh’s recent paintings mostly oil  and acrylic on canvas and an installation with a door frame and diptych painting. The exhibition will be on from January 6 to 12 in the Capital.

Shadow Journal is an account of real life encounters in the city and the travel of the artist Sangeeta Singh on the rickshaws. Sangeeta Singh repeatedly celebrates their efforts in ‘running’ the city by highlighting the rickshaw and the pullers in a cinematic way. They are presented as slices of suspense before revealing their existence as a whole. Every frame is given a witness and the witness is the artist herself. It is another way of telling them that they are not alone in their plight of existence.

The plight of cycle rickshawwalahs is accentuated through modes of focusing and fragmenting and is contrasted with the bold presence of the artist within the pictorial scheme. One could say that in these paintings, the artist reduces the cityscape or landscape around her to the minimum and maximizes the presence of her own fragmented identity; she herself turns into a landscape within which or against which the rickshaw pullers work.

Sangeeta Singh, born 1968 at Lucknow studied and passed her postgraduate degrees in Chemistry and Education from the University of Lucknow, but then turned her attention to pursuing art, more as a passion rather than a profession. She trained for six years at Triveni Kala Sangam in New Delhi and learnt painting under the expert guidance of eminent artist Rameshwar Broota and continued to hone her skills through practice and added learning. She studied art appreciation at the national Museum Institute in Delhi and refined her technique further by training and working for two years under senior Aizawl- Mizoram artists R. Thansanga and Thlangrokhuma. 

Through perseverance, hard work and devotion, the artist continues to experiment and innovate and bring freshness to her creations. Recipient of awards including a Ministry of Culture fellowship, Sangeeta’s work has been exhibited in nearly fifty different shows to-date, a few solos and many group exhibitions, including those for charities and social causes and held at prominent Indian galleries in Delhi, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Aizawl and Kolkata, and internationally at Winter sports Museum in Austria thrice, Muzeum Gallery- Slovenia, in Hungary, Mexico, Argentina, Dubai and twice in Italy, amongst others. She has also attended some art camps and residencies and spoken at international conferences including the recent art symposium at Unterpremstätten- Austria. Keen to share her knowledge and skills with others she also teaches art to young learners and aspiring artists.