We are delighted and honored to share Unfolding, a
solo presentation of new paintings, watercolors & drawings by Arpita Singh. Entering her 90th year,
Singh is one of India’s most significant artists. Far
from resting on her laurels, she reflects from a distilled perspective shaped over decades, while continuing to push the limits of her painting.
Untitled | 2025 (Detail)
Over the decades, Singh folds together time, personal memories and shared histories in her paintings, experienced and lived, observed and created, all inhabiting the same space. In these open planes of intimacy on canvas and paper, connections deliberate and the unexpected emerge, creating shards of meaning while eluding our grasps, but never without touching us.
With the long lens of time, in Unfolding, Singh seems to be looking back as well looking within. Perspectives are from a distance, reflecting on what has been, seeing what is and questioning what will be.
These are liminal spaces, in which different cities, countries, and oceans are melding into one another.
What she is trying to achieve and evoke is an atmosphere, a feeling of being in a world that is spinning out of control.
Shanay Jhaveri
Women sitting | 2025 | (Detail)
In “Women, sitting” amidst a sea of dark and light pinks, floating shreds of blue ribbons with text and fragments of unmoored homes share space with calm figures of women, seated cross legged and unhurried, as if cradling a child or a prayer. The text ‘In every storm look for the rainbow’ meandering and broken, appears repeatedly. Icons of sun, moon, stars, clouds and rain, exist alongside phrases such as ‘Arabian Sea’ and ‘Bank locker’ recalling both the cycles of nature, and of life, in continuous process. A turbulence of blue, contained within bands of bright colors along the periphery of “Uncertain visit” surrounds a diagonal island in shape of a boat. A refuge, perhaps for the figures in earthly reds, black and ghostly white, appearing from the tumult of uncertainty, a journey interrupted, a stay truncated. In a marked departure in "Kites" the wide blue expanse in the middle of the painting is largely untextured and calm with swirling fragments of texts and a kettle of hawks filling the sky. Beneath it, women sit on bright red benches, apart, yet sharing a togetherness. There is a sense of acceptance and quiet solace. Sparse and distilled, somber and reflective.
Arpita is now primarily in a mood of quiet contemplation
of the soft colours, the simplified figures….
Her deep humanism is clearly felt.
Ella Datta
I walked into myself through others | 2023 (Detail)
On large sheets of paper Singh paints, marks, scrapes, rubs, incises and erases, and transforms watercolors into a tour de force where figures command a solid presence amidst shards of text floating in a dense sea of colored translucence. The letters, partially obscured, reversed or truncated, gently solicit their own decryption and assign meaning. Poetic and contemplative, “I walked into myself through others” features standing figures whose folded arms resemble a heart. While floating in a field of pink “Erased and crossed out” depicts the introspection of women contemplating loss or time gone by. Whereas “Where will the birds fly” shows us the hint of a city skyline under a blue sky filled with airplanes ferrying back and forth, and above it is a pink expanse replete with - fantastical colored symbols and forms, welcoming and other worldly. Arpita seems to have come a full circle since “starting over” almost half a century ago and once again she finds herself at another threshold, wondering what lies beyond.
The question Singh seems to be asking herself is
can she go on making the paintings she has—
Is this enough? Are they enough?
Shanay Jhaveri
Arpita Singh, 2026
Arpita Singh was born in 1937 in West Bengal, India, and moved with her family to New Delhi in 1946, where she has since lived and worked. She attended the School of Art, Delhi Polytechnic, graduating in 1959. Singh is regarded as one of the pioneering artists of post-independence India, with a practice spanning more than seven decades. Her paintings bring together figuration, abstraction, and elements drawn from Bengali folk traditions and Indian stories, creating richly layered visual narratives. Her work explores the intersections of personal memory and lived experience with broader histories of social upheaval, gender, violence, and political change.
Singh’s work has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions in India and internationally. In 2025, The Serpentine Galleries, London, presented Remembering, Singh’s first institutional solo exhibition outside India and in 2019, The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) New Delhi, presented Submergence: In the Midst of Here and There, a retrospective spanning six decades.
Singh’s works have also been exhibited at The Barbican, London; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Bilbao; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Peabody Essex Museum; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Asia Society, New York; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, among others. She has participated in international biennials including the Gwangju Biennale, Asia Society Triennial, Havana Biennial, and Triennale-India. Singh was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2011 and received a fellowship from the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, in 2014.
Arpita Singh lives and works in New Delhi, India.
Everything influences me. Whatever I read, whatever I do, all are connected to my art.
Arpita Singh
