Untitled | 2013 | Oil on canvas | 60″ x 48″ | TG 3376
Rich, dense and vibrant, Paramjit’s paintings with clustering trees, sprawling grass and foliage, and flowing bodies of water evoke an experience of nature, materializing as memory. The forms of nature are suggested – hinted through dynamic brushstrokes and brilliant flecks of color – emerging as familiar yet otherworldly environs. While his smaller and more subdued charcoal drawings offer another experience of nature and memory in light and shadow – in which lush forestation enfolds, suffuses, and transports. Imbuing his paintings with palpability, while shrouded in a sense of mystery, Singh explores that which is beyond the perceived, searching out memory and the visceral. His fictitious landscapes – boundless and without pictorial depth, quiet yet chaotic – trace topographies that reflect not only the movement and spontaneity of nature but the transcendent experience of it as well.
Paramjit Singh was born in 1935 in Amritsar, Punjab. After finishing his initial education at Khalsa College in Amritsar, he joined School of Art, Delhi Polytechnic, Delhi in 1953 and completed his Fine Art studies in 1958. He was founding member of the group The Unknown, a group of young artists in Delhi in 1960. Singh also taught Fine arts for three decades as Professor and then Head of the art department at Jamia Millia University, Delhi. A film directed by Amit Datta, The Seventh Walk based on the art of Paramjit Singh was presented at Film festivals in Toronto, San Francisco, Rotterdam, Rome and as well at MoMA, New York.
Singh had his first solo show in 1967 in New Delhi, India and since then has exhibited and worldwide including Germany, Norway, Belgium Hongkong, Singapore, London and New York. Singh’s works are in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi, Chandigarh Museum of Art, Chandigarh and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi.
Paramjit Singh lives and works in New Delhi, India.
