Arpita Singh: Remembering

From her pictographic cityscapes to her intimate ink drawings, Singh's dreamlike visions reckon with global upheaval and its effect on the female psyche

Published with Serpentine Gallery.

Drawing upon Bengali folk art and Indian mythology, painter Arpita Singh (born 1937) creates intimate and introspective scenes informed by her own responses to global conflict. Remembering, titled after the artist's psychologically-focused practice and the power of individual and collective memory, commemorates Singh's first institutional exhibition outside of India. A visual confection, this peony-pink paperback with flaps is an elegant survey of Singh's large-scale paintings, intimate watercolors and ink drawings reproduced across more than 150 color plates. It opens with four new introductory essays and concludes with two fresh artist conversations with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Tamsin Hong. Finally, the text around the back cover of the catalog entices us, by Singh's own urging, to look again: "What is a dreamlike, imaginative world to you is a real world for me."