Indian artist Arpita Singh, whose soft yet frenetic paintings channel dreamlike imagery in a panoply of styles, died today in New Delhi. She was 89. Her husband, fellow artist Paramjit Singh, confirmed her death.
“She was resolute and a formidable force in a five-foot frame yet yielded influence far beyond, including as a mentor and inspiration for generations of artists in India that followed,” New York and New Delhi art dealer Deepak Talwar said. “I for one am immensely grateful to the Singh family for their impact and indebted to Arpita for the constancy of her wisdom, generosity, and friendship for three decades.”
Singh was born in Baranagar in 1937. Her family moved from Calcutta to New Delhi when she was 10, after her father’s death. She went on to earn a fine arts degree from Delhi Polytechnic in 1959. From there, Singh took a job with the Indian government’s Weavers’ Service Centre, which promotes Indian textile traditions. The role regularly required her to visit museums to brush up on art history. Singh said later that those experiences taught her to see how art can mimic nature.
In 1972, a decade after co-founding the Unknown artist group, she received her first solo show at New Delhi’s Kunika Chemould Gallery. That exhibition made Singh realize she “was not moving naturally on canvas,” she told the Guardian last year. She responded by spending six years working in lines and dots. It led her “to develop an easiness in movement,” she said in an interview with Asia Society in 2022. “That is to say I can make a form and more easily bring other forms in relation to it.”
Singh returned to figuration by the 1980s, creating folk-inspired paintings centered on women. Words entered her work once she realized her paint knife left marks resembling Roman letters. In the 1980s, she participated in scores of group exhibitions both abroad and at home, where Singh joined her peers Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh, and Madhvi Parekh in staging a major show of women artists, “Through the Looking Glass,” that traveled domestically.
Later, Singh shifted to creating oil paintings that are charged with emotion, like Debi Pistol Wali (1990) and The Eternal Repose (1997)—two of her most famous works. Though powerful, unconventional women are at the heart of these scenes, Singh resisted overtly feminist readings. “I don’t decide in advance whether the woman is going to be thin or fat, pretty or ugly,” she once told the Times of India. “Anyway, glamorous women with hourglass shapes are for film and television. I paint real women.”
Singh’s efforts helped spur the rising interest in South Asian artists on the global art market. When her massive Wish dream (in 16 parts), 2000–01, sold for $2.22 million at auction at Saffronart in 2010, it was the highest price ever paid for a woman artist from India.
Despite Singh’s decades of acclaim, she only opened her first U.S. gallery show at the now-defunct Bose Pacia Modern gallery in 1997. Her first solo museum show outside of India was last year, at the Serpentine Gallery in London. An exhibition of her work, “Unfolding,” is on view at Talwar Gallery in New York through February 27, 2027.