Woman Plucking Flowers

Arpita Singh’s paintings conflate the politics and poetics of everyday life through visual fables of female bodies and intimate social relations, powerfully tracing the fragility of the human condition.
- D. Ayas and N. Ginwala, 2021

Arpita Singh was born in Baranagar in Bengal before the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. She studied at the School of Art, Delhi Polytechnic, and after graduating, worked as a designer at the Weavers’ Service Centres in Calcutta and New Delhi for four years. Over the years, Singh developed a highly distinctive visual language typified by a rich layering of color, strong brushwork and the employment of evocative metaphors and motifs drawn from her personal experiences.

The time she spent at the Weavers’ Service Centre particularly influenced the evolution of her artistic vocabulary and her creative process. Many of her paintings utilize the stylistic devices and methods of kantha, a Bengali embroidery and textile-based craft, practiced primarily by rural women. Like the individual stiches of kanthas, her brushstrokes embellish the entire surface of the canvas with detailed forms and figures, and are only held in check by the ornamental borders she paints at their edges. Foregoing perspective to emphasize figural relationships and patterns, her works also quote this textile tradition in their depictions of scenes from daily life, particularly of women.

It is through her female protagonists, surrounded by objects that are both mundane and otherworldly, private and public, peaceful and violent, that Singh’s compositions subtly address challenging social and political subject matter while maintaining an overall impression of grace and quiet luminosity. The artist “absorbs the complexities of the world and represents them in her own distinctive way through the sensuous use of paint and brush, signalling joy, wonder, menace and melancholy in an intricate kaleidoscope of human emotions” (E. Dutta, Arpita Singh Picture Postcard 2003-2006, New Delhi, 2006, p. 1).

In Singh’s paintings, scattered motifs like guns, airplanes and numbers from calendar pages embody “comings and goings, the inevitability and implicit danger of separation and reunion, and the inescapability of death. She makes the past and the faraway co-present, in the anticipation of separation, by travel or death” (S. Bean, 'Now, Then, Beyond, Time in India's Contemporary Art', Contemporary Indian Art, Other Realities, Mumbai, 2002, p. 54).

The present lot, Woman Plucking Flowers from 1994, is one of the artist’s most significant paintings, unmistakably defining her oeuvre of the 1990s and firmly cementing her place among India’s most respected modern artists. Here, Singh situates her protagonist in a garden, created from thickly textured swirls of cornflower blue and mauve paint. Typically understood as a sheltered, domestic space, this setting magnifies the vulnerability that the female figure’s naked, aging body already conveys. Hunched over, she is absorbed in the task of gathering flowers, perhaps to celebrate life or mourn death, both markers of the unrelenting passage of time. Pointedly, the only element of this dense composition that transgresses the thresholds of its painted border is the torso of an armed man at the lower right. Dressed in black, he points his pistol directly at the unsuspecting woman above him. At the upper center two planes idle in the border, partially obscuring the word ‘GARDEN’ that Singh inscribes there, perhaps warning of another possible violation of the pearmeable boundaries between the woman’s private and public worlds.

Writing about this painting, Yashodhara Dalmia notes, “In Woman Plucking Flowers, we have a nude woman bending over a bed of flowers at the far end of a lake-like garden. As the eye travels over the shimmering blue, interspersed by brown triangles, which could be sexual symbols, it rests on a man pointing his pistol at the woman from the opposite side. The still, silent, aquamarine blue with the sinister figure holds the moment in suspension. This sense of violation is articulated in many of [Singh’s] paintings of the nineties” (Y. Dalmia and S. Hashmi, Memory, Metaphor, Mutations: Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan, New Delhi, 2007, p. 143).

Describing Singh’s visual vocabulary as fluctuating between playful and pained, Deepak Ananth observes that in her paintings like Woman Plucking Flowers, “the poetics of free association also becomes a politics, and it is the secret tension between these registers that constitutes the enigmatic force field of Singh’s work in the last twenty years. The figure/ground gestalt becomes transposed as a chiasmus of pleasure and pain; the surface remains as delectable as ever, but the deeper structure of the paintings is keyed to motifs of desolation and death [...] Mortality stalks Singh’s pictorial world. Gun-toting men lie in ambush or wander about with impunity, casually aiming at all and sundry. Women, more often than not, are their unsuspecting targets. A naked woman bending in a field choking with blue flowers, unaware that a man dressed in black is pointing a firearm at her: an ‘X’ marks the spot indeed, or rather, a dark triangular patch (ostensibly a flower pot, but of a suggestively anthropomorphous aspect) at which the pistol is cocked” (D. Ananth, ‘Profound Play’, Arpita Singh, New Delhi, 2015, p. 38).