An intense, diffused aesthetic, a dalliance with strokes that consist of dots, lines, and dashes on sheets of paper - art lovers can admire Arpita Singh's abstractions that goes back in time - 1973-1982. Entitled 'Tying Down Time' at the Talwar Gallery in New York, this show puts the spotlight on Bengal's greatest woman artist in contemporary art creations in India.
Wish Dream
Why is Arpita Singh important? Singh's monumental mural 'Wish Dream', composed of 16 individual pieces and measuring 24 feet by 13 feet, fetched – Rs 9.6 crore – at an online auction by Saffron art in 2010. 'Wish Dream' used to grace the wall of Bodhi Art at its office in Qutub Intsitutional area in Delhi and belonged to the brilliant Amit Judge.
Created in 2001, this work was a special commission for Nandita Judge (wife of Amit Judge) who was a Director and daughter of Times of India Jains.The record-breaking piece, 16-panel mural took the Delhi-based artist one year to complete.
In 2005 when I was writing an essay on 'Wish Dream', Arpita said, "When Nandita asked me to do the work; I actually said 'no', because it was so huge and challenging. Then, I didn't have a clue (about) where I should begin, so I started reading books on epics and old literature. Someone lent me a book about a Tibetan play, which was a version of the Ramayana. I was reading the introduction and came across the words 'Wish Dreams'. Immediately, I could start thinking about what to draw."
Influenced by Buddhist thangka painting, 'Wish Dream' depicts a sprinkling of human figures flowers and birds in flight, with a recurring motif of a female ascetic draped in white. Singh explained her symbolism: "The mural shows the wishes and dreams of a woman within our society and how it progresses and how it's related to other women through ritual. The most important ritual is the wedding, so you'll find a woman standing and from behind, two hands of a man holding her. I don't like to keep space empty, so I fill it up with objects I see everyday. When I gather everything together, the whole pattern is meaningful. Individual forms are not very important to me."
Early Years
Arpita's life is a tableau of events unfolding in the backdrop of India's partition. Born as Arpita Dutta in 1937, she lost her father when she was six years old. In 1946, she moved with her mother from Baranagar, a suburb in north Calcutta, to Bengali Market in Delhi. There, Arpita witnessed the horrific killing of a man in the riots that broke out in the wake of India's independence and partition. Violence and its aftermath are scenes that keep appearing, tangentially, in her work. Before her unfolded harsh circumstances of life in black and white, she spent time looking at calendars and posters.
She was fascinated by the half-tone paintings and oleographs, that showed royal women or goddesses draped in glorious georgette saris. Singh's early paintings, consisting of abstract shapes defined by a confident use of colours, won her critical attention. For much of her early career, she loved Paul Klee and the Russian abstract expressionist Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall and Henri Rousseau.
With these western masters ruminating in her mind, she created works that moved between still life and abstraction. Her Flags in the Lalit Kala Akademi Collection in Delhi is a fine example.
Abstractions at Talwar
Here at Talwar Gallery, there are two sets of works – one set that are monochromes throbbing with the intensity of life, and the second set are dulcet chromatics reflected hues and cadences of infinite aberrations in strokes of poster colour and charcoal and pen and ink.
It is in those eight years, she practiced only lines and grids, and repeatedly made dots and shards of strokes and patterns on small sheets of paper. The works evince deep concentration and perseverance within the sensibility. Arpita the voracious reader and the gentle intellectual, quotes Paul Klee with affection and reverence: "Paul Klee believed that art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes visible. I have embraced this sentiment as an article of faith."
About her love for books she says: "I used to read voraciously from my father's library, the plays of Shakespeare or heavy philosophical tomes, sometimes I didn't understand but still I read."
"I have always been fascinated by the common roots of various languages, by the mystical formation of the Roman alphabet with the sudden coming together of two lines, by the way in which two things meld into each other and form an original," she says.
In this show of 35 works we see short, staccato repetitive strokes of the pen, and later the brush; the tendency for these marks to converge and condense, building up into form or coalescing into patterns that are sparse as well as dense in terms of compositional structures.
The tensile textured surfaces seem to just hold together, as if tracing the past as well as foreshadowing the future. These early works in 'Tying down time' point to Arpita's engagement with time, helmed into the myriad moods of absorptive quiescence.