Artforum

IN THE MIDDLE of the painting is a woman in a white sari. Her face is serene. She stands with both feet on top of a man lying on the ground in a fetal position. He is alive, but acquiescent. His eyes are full of remorse. 

The woman has five arms. One holds the loose end of her sari away from her face. Another holds a mango. Another holds a gun. The gun is pointed at a shrunken figure of a man trying to defend himself with a sword and shield. He falls backward, cartoonishly. 

Circling the woman are various objects rendered gesturally: a car, a flowering plant, pieces of fruit, a prostrate child, a turtle. They are suspended in a concrete-gray realm, held aloft and apart like fruits encased in aspic. Above the woman is a strip of sky. A plane flies through it, as does a bird, as do six red flowers. 

The whole scene is rimmed with a painted border of blooms, vines, leaves, and the profiles of three men; the border visually flattens the painting, as though it is an image reproduced on a quilt, or a panel in a comic strip. 

This painting, Devi Pistol Wali, 1990, is among the 165 works on display in “Remembering,” Arpita Singh’s retrospective at London’s Serpentine Galleries. Born in 1937 in the Bengali city of Baranagar, near Kolkata, Singh has been painting for well over half a century and is among India’s most celebrated and prolific contemporary artists. This is her first solo show outside of the subcontinent. 

Singh is best known for large-scale paintings such as this one—colorful, dense works of thickly applied paint that juxtapose motifs like flowers, cars, suited men, animals, and mythic figures. These elements often are positioned on a flat plane, exaggeratedly scaled, or overlaid with patterns or words, resulting in kaleidoscopic, gravity-defying tableaux that collapse the ordinary and the supernatural. 

The artist’s visual language is iconic and uniquely her own, but at the same time, her oeuvre is marked by relentless experimentation. Looking across the six decades of work presented at the Serpentine, it is a delight to witness her thinking unspool, evolve, and loop back on itself, as she moves across forms and formlessness, color and its absence, intimate evocations of domestic life and signs of social fracture. The twists and turns of Singh’s long career demonstrate how her appetite for reinvention advanced the essential preoccupations that were there from the start. 

Here, there is no separation between conflict and pleasure; natural forms and man-made ones; myth and reality; the subconscious realm and external forces. They all exist at once, circling and swirling, together and apart.

In Singh’s early paintings, varied, suggestive elements like playing cards, empty vessels, half-rendered figures, and warped flowers populate saturated fields of color and deploy the anti-logic of Surrealism; they feel like coded psychoanalytic riddles in the costume of Indian miniature paintings. Works from the mid-1970s to the early ’80s find Singh turning to abstraction, using ink and watercolor to create striking, largely black-and-white experiments that explore pattern and line and sometimes evoke calligraphy or ecological terrain. Then, in the mid-’80s, color returns, and her works become increasingly figural. She renders scenes of fellow artists, family members, neighbors, and mythological beings while continuing to fill the canvas with patterns and assorted motifs. Through the ’90s, we see luscious jewel-tone watercolors of irreverent women, as well as delicate depictions of flowers and figures whose translucent limbs and clothes call to mind medical illustrations. Since the turn of the millennium, she has turned her attention specifically toward global conflicts, creating potent, frenetic works that layer soldiers, prisoners, or military equipment; a pervasive sense of rupture is suggested by torn strips of paper and fragments of text, maps, and geometric patterns that hark back to her earlier abstract works. 

Devi Pistol Wali, which was painted in 1990—the middle of the artist’s career—feels emblematic of her wide-ranging oeuvre. It is full of Singh’s hallmarks, from freewheeling objects to textile-like patterns (she worked for a time at the Weavers’ Service Centre, an Indian government body that supports the handloom industry) to mythological allusions and the specter of violence. Devi is the word for a female Hindu deity; the woman-goddess in the painting assumes a classic stance, perched victoriously atop a cowering opponent. For many, she might call to mind Kali, the goddess of time and destruction as well as of divine feminine energy. Kali is frequently depicted as a terrifying figure, holding a bloody severed head and trampling a slain corpse. However, this devi appears gentler and more magnanimous. Indeed, in Bengal, where Singh grew up, Kali often appears as a benevolent mother figure, protecting her children from misfortune while Lord Shiva, her husband and consort, lies devotedly at her feet. The multiarmed devi in the painting, dressed in widow’s white, wears a calm expression while two of her hands offer up flowers and fruit. In a striking contrast, another hand coolly deploys a pistol to fend off a male intruder—an embodiment of the ever-present threats looming just beyond the frame. 

The objects that surround the goddess are beguiling. They could have been plucked from the subconscious, like stray thoughts and memories made manifest. They oscillate between the mundane, the beautiful, and the sinister—perhaps a reflection of the layered, associative nature of the psyche itself. The ripe tones of the mangoes and flowers are seductive, while the gray-black bird overhead, which is almost the same shape as the plane beside it (except bigger), creates a menacing atmosphere. Meanwhile, the bowing child and a stern older woman’s face—each flanking the central figure—might refer to generational knowledge and the trace of inherited memories, ideas of great interest to Singh. “It’s not the experience in itself,” she said in a recent interview, “but the essence of these experiences, which leave an impression on you and are constantly pricking you.”

Untethered and distinct, each element in Devi Pistol Wali feels both symbolic and mysterious; the forms interact, inevitably suggesting a narrative. But they also resist singular interpretations, offering the viewer a kind of unsolvable puzzle. This is Singh’s preference: for meaning-making to be expansive and unprescribed, even contradictory. “There should be a difference between what the viewer sees and what the artist paints,” she has said. Singh is notoriously resistant to explaining her work, and often cheekily provides different answers to different people, just to keep viewers and critics on their toes. For instance, when asked why she incorporates words into some of her paintings, she has answered that her abstract mark-marking sometimes looked to her like letters and words, and then she ran with that idea. But she also has said that she uses words because when she started out as an artist, she couldn’t afford paper and instead drew and painted on exhibition catalogues, and got used to having words in the background. 

It is likely that both are true. In a similar sense, the flat plane of Singh’s paintings, within which everything unfolds—myths, memories, elements of daily life, signs of peril and violence—seems to make an argument about simultaneity. Conceptually, it is a leveling technique, and an equalizing one. The absence of perspective does away with hierarchies and strict oppositions. Here, there is no separation between conflict and pleasure; natural forms and man-made ones; myth and reality; the subconscious realm and external forces. They all exist at once, circling and swirling, together and apart.

Singh moved from Bengal to Delhi as a child, and is of a generation that grew up in the shadow of Partition and of the bloodshed that trailed India’s independence; among her earliest memories is witnessing a man being killed on the street as she stood on her balcony. It might help explain the stark dualities in her work (military planes, flowers) and the blurred boundaries between domestic spheres and external realities. She looks at the world with a child’s unjaded eye, deeply attuned to wonder and suffering and strangeness, to the desire to name and the impossibility of making sense. This is territory she shares with contemporaries like Nalini Malani, Madhvi Parekh, and Nilima Sheikh, with whom she began exhibiting in the 1980s in a landscape dominated by men. In their own ways, each of these artists plays with time and memory, harnessing traditional Indian symbols alongside contemporary experiments to insist upon the coexistence of the past and the present, of imagination and reality, of violence and beauty.  

It is tempting to call Singh’s surreal canvases “dreamlike,” or to describe their unmoored elements as “floating in space,” but the artist takes issue with both descriptions. In dreams, she says, one lacks agency. In her paintings, she makes the rules. Her paintings are not dreamworlds—they are real worlds of her own creation. In the worlds of her paintings, objects do not “float,” because gravity does not exist. Objects can live anywhere. A bird can swallow a plane. A flower can dance. A mouth can fly. In the universes she creates, that is reality. The patterned border that surrounds Devi Pistol Wali, which also appears in many of her other paintings, emphasizes this: Like a planetary force, it holds each particular world together, underscoring its discrete logic. “I control the law,” Singh has said of her work. “I’m the master.” 

“Arpita Singh: Remembering” is on view through July 27 at Serpentine Galleries, London.

Meara Sharma is a writer based in London.

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