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.
In one early painting, a woman tends to her garden as a mother nurses her child. People drive by in cars, a kid peers around a curtain and a figure sleeps while jets fly overhead. Perspectives don’t make sense and picture planes clash, but it all coalesces into a gorgeous world of blue, a portrait of female care and tenderness in the hectic hustle of urbanity.
That battle between inner life and sociopolitical reality plays out across all the best works here. A couple takes tea in front of a saluting soldier, a multi-armed Kali-esque woman fights off a bureaucrat with a gun while balancing on a sleeping man. Everywhere you look there are the same images, repeated over and over like memories looping back: flowers, cars, soldiers, bureaucrats in black, looming men and countless women.
The women matter here because they nurture, care and provide in a world that otherwise seems hellbent on chaos and violence. This comes out most clearly in watercolours from the 1990s: psychedelic visions of motherhood and femininity that are gorgeously tender and vulnerable. And even though the bigger paintings until about 2002 are the stars of the show, the works on paper are great, clearer and more concise than the paintings but still full of Singh’s hallmarks.
Works from the past 20 years take a more collage-like approach, creating big patchy canvases plastered with words, human figures and strips of clashing colours. There are references to war, conflict, displacement, nods to Indian epics – they’re interesting paintings, but most of them are just splotchy, semi-abstract and incoherent, and don’t convey her ideas or aesthetic as well as the earlier pieces. While they’re not great, maybe that makes sense with the theme of the show. Maybe it reflects how your memory frays and splinters, how images increasingly struggle to coalesce in your mind’s eye.
There is a lot here that will go over the heads of a non-Indian audience, and a lot that goes largely unexplained. There are just so many references to folk art, Indian court painting and current events that aren’t so current any more. Trying to figure it all out can leave you feeling a little delirious. But Singh wants viewers to take the work at face value, to interpret it for themselves. So what you’re left with is a sort of beautiful chaos of memory, a vision of life where the political, personal, societal and domestic meld into one big past. That’s how we remember, isn’t it? Everything jumbled together and hopefully, in the end, quite beautiful.
