Artforum

Renowned Indian painter Arpita Singh, whose dreamlike depictions of floating women earned her comparisons to Marc Chagall and influenced generations of artists, died on November 9 in a New Delhi hospital. She was eighty-nine. Drawing from traditional Indian folk art, miniature paintings, and weaving, Singh centered Indian women in crowded, festive paintings filled with flora and fauna and occasionally tinged with violence. Despite the efforts of many to affiliate her work with a feminist or political belief system, Singh refused categorization. “Things happen on their own,” Singh told The Guardian in a 2025 interview. “The affairs of political and social life come into my painting like the way light comes as color and breeze comes as movement.”

Arpita Singh was born Arpita Dutta on June 22, 1937, in Baranagar, in what is now West Bengal. In 1946, she moved with her parents to New Delhi, where she would remain all her life. The following year, the Partition of India took place; the violence of the event, which divided the British-ruled country into the independent nations of Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, would shape her artistic output over six decades to come.

In 1954, on the advice of a high school teacher, she enrolled in Delhi Polytechnic’s School of Art, where she studied under legendary Indian modernists Biren De and Sailoz Mookherjea and was introduced to the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Shortly after graduating in 1959, she went to work at the Weavers Service Centre, a government agency that promoted the craft of weaving. Tasked with evaluating shawls, she began investigating clothmaking traditions, and gained an understanding of pattern and technique—including pattachitra scroll painting and kantha embroidery—that she would soon bring to bear in her painting.

As the 1960s dawned, along with a handful of former art school classmates, she helped to found the Unknown, a progressive artists’ collective that experimented with various visual vocabularies, and with whom she first exhibited at group shows. That same decade, Singh, now married to fellow artist Paramjit Singh, began to gain national attention as a modernist painter, originally embracing a faux-naïve figurative style and eventually receiving her first solo show in 1972, at New Delhi’s Kunika Chemould Gallery.

At the exhibition’s close, feeling that she was not “moving naturally on canvas,” as she told The Guardian, she switched to painting or drawing dots and lines, often in black and white. Typical of these works is the hypnotic Untitled, 1976, a cliff of tiny black lines and X’s—their tight formation suggesting a textile’s weave—that grows slightly narrower at the bottom, where several key-like shapes drift in a stack, perhaps having fallen from its top. Another Untitled, this one from 1981, shows a packed field of black needle-like shapes, in whose midst floats a band of what look like minuscule, gun-shaped forms. “It was like practicing handwriting before I found my voice again,” she later explained.

By the 1980s, in response to the nearly two-year-long state of emergency declared by Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1975, she had returned to narrative figuration, this time adding text fragments to her busy renderings of gravity-defying scenes. Also in the ’80s, Singh, alongside compatriots Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh, and Madhvi Parekh, mounted a traveling exhibition of women artists, titled “Behind the Looking Glass.”

The following decade would see Singh create some of her best-known works. Among these are Devi Pistol Wali, 1990, and My Mother, 1993, both featuring the impassive-seeming women and cartoonish men that characterize her output. In the earlier canvas, the subject, clad in filmy white and possessed of five arms, aims a gun at a diminutive male figure who appears to be dropping out of the sky. In the later work, made in the wake of the 1992–93 Bombay riots sparked by the destruction of the Babri Mosque, an older woman gazes stoically at the viewer, male bodies littering a road bisecting the canvas, soldiers gesturing wildly behind them as they dodge bicycles and cars.

The spread of cable television brought the Gulf War into Singh’s works, as Meera Menezes pointed out in a 2019 issue of Artforum, and her canvases seemed to become increasingly jumbled and vibrant, as evinced for example by 2007’s Buy Two Get Two Free, depicting a pair of binocular-wielding male figures gazing at two scantily clad women accompanied by a duo of vultures and a couple of freakish mushrooms. Similarly entrancing is 2005’s My Lollipop City: Gemini Rising, a fantastical map of New Delhi arrayed with masculine bureaucratic figures, overhung with dozens of tiny airplanes, and festooned with text, one fragment of which reads “THE MAP IS FAULTY DO NOT FOLLOW IT.”

In 2010, Singh achieved the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a living female Indian artist with the $2.24 million sale at Saffronart of her sixteen-panel mural The Wish Dream, 2001. In 2019, she was the subject of a major retrospective at New Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Though her work appeared in numerous group shows in museums around the world for decades, she only began to achieve real acclaim outside India in the last years of her life, receiving her first solo institutional show outside the country—a survey at the Serpentine in London—in 2025. A US solo show, “Unfolding,” is on view at New York’s Talwar Gallery though February 27, 2027.

Singh’s work is held in the collections of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Kirin Nadar Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Modern Art, both in New Delhi. Her only daughter, artist Anjum Singh, died in 2020. She is survived by her husband.