Saffronart unveils its most ambitious offering at its Winter Sale December 8-9, with Arpita Singh’s mural “Wish Dream” created by the artist in 2001. Sixteen canvases sprinkled with flowers, people, aeroplanes, and central figures, say very little about the reach and impact of this historic work. When she created it, she was the first artist to discuss the role of male conception.

Her work is narrative and semi-autobiographical in nature. Her canvases depict family, friends and neighbours surrounded by everyday objects like plants, fruit, cars and planes. Frequently, these symbols of the mundane are numbered and titled, superimposed on calendar-like grids or maps as if to impose order to a seemingly random composition. The work can be both humorous and disturbing at the same time, frequently depicting her own very personal vision of the role of the female in contemporary Indian society.
Arpita Singh began her professional life as a textile designer and this experience clearly influences the compositional structure of her canvases, but it is the careful combination of whimsical compositions, her bold use of colour and her confident control of her medium that reveals her extraordinary talent as a painter.
The men and women in this free-floating composition address challenging social and political subject matter, while maintaining an aura of gentle grace and quiet luminosity.
Typically depicting women situated amongst icons, signifying both violence and domesticity, Singh reduces her figures in this piece to the level of objects equating them through her use of scale, her attention to detail and her compositional placement with the litany of ordinary items in the work. This is very apparent in the central figures in this work of two women and two men, which depicts a goddess like woman, with four arms standing on a lotus like pillow while around her are other figures and flowers. The blue clad women and men seem almost ascetic and the little white clad figures so much like women monks.
The choice of so many middle aged women as well as the single central figure has numerous connotations suggesting both the iconography of Hindu deities found in temple sculpture and popular Hindu imagery as well as addressing the simple conundrum of the modern woman juggling, home, work, children and her relationships. The reclining pose of the man on top also resonates with a metaphor of Vishnu. Man and woman must co exist in this firmament. Often incorporating familiar, everyday images into her work the flowers and the colours yellow pink and blue each have their own roles to signify.
The title Wish Dream is an idea Singh got from a Tibetan play that she read. The words “wish dream” appeared in the play and the idea of the title defined itself through the many ripples of wave like streams in the composition as well as the ripples of the chants in the many men and women she used for her choreography of a canticle-like creation.
In the world of contemporary Indian art, no woman artist has achieved her prowess or status. Arpita is perhaps best understood as a master narrative painter. Throughout her career she has provided an ongoing discourse on the sorrow and angst and joy and suffering and hope and despair that effects her gender, her country, and the world. This is eloquently portrayed in the vibrant hues and subtle textures of her deftly executed watercolors and translated in oil onto her important works on canvas. As a figurative painter and a modernist, she is in touch with the history of Indian aesthetics from classical miniaturists to traditional folk painters. Her use of perspective as a narrative tool shows a true understanding of her heritage in miniature painting.
She’s renowned for her unabashed use of brilliant colour in simple, almost naive configurations rendering the pulsating plurality of life teeming with cars and guns, planes, humans and flowers and animals, inhabiting an enchanted, magical world. With all this, she pays the greatest tribute to the folk traditions of India’s past and present. Though it may be thought of as mastery over contemporary painting technique or as a device to separate foreground and render depth, her use of patterning and decorative motif and her dynamic, fluid, and relentless use of every inch of pictorial space fills her paintings with life and cause them to emit a luminous phosphorescence.
Many years ago, Jaya Appaswamy wrote: “The colours are rich, astringent, and even garish, the outlines crisp and stiff, the drawing consciously naive... Like playing card characters all these images are scissor-cut and tailored to fulfill a specific role, they are actors who have spilled on to a planar surface and there take part in a elaborate and variegated pageant. If some figures stand on their heads and others are only seen in part, this is the way the artist has planned their being. In the total structure the eye travels from motif to motif as in a carnival and like in a carnival there is restlessness and laughter.” This holds true in Wish Dream.
Saffronart will hold a special preview of its Winter Sale at Trident Hotel in Gurgoan on November 20.