The Ritual

PROPERTY FROM AN INTERNATIONAL COLLECTION

Oil on canvas
1989
66 x 60 in. (167.5 x 152.5 cm.)

Signed and dated ‘ARPITA SINGH 89’ upper right and further signed and inscribed ‘ARPITA SINGH / ‘THE RITUAL ’ / NOT FOR SALE’ on reverse

EXHIBITED:
Another Energy: Power to Continue Challenging – 16 Women Artists from around the World, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 22 April, 2021 – 16 January, 2022.
Asia Society Triennial: We Do Not Dream Alone, Asia Society, New York, 27 October, 2020 – 7 February, 2021.
Submergence: In the Midst of Here and There, Arpita Singh, Six Decades of Painting, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, 30 January – 14 July, 2019.

LITERATURE:
Deepak Ananth, Arpita Singh, New Delhi, 2015, p. 85.
Jason Farago, ‘A Festival of New Asian Art, Seeking a Direction’, The New York Times, 18 November, 2020, illustrated.
Roobina Karode, ‘Lost Rivers, Origami, and the Immersive Aesthetics of Arpita Singh’, Another Energy: Power to Continue Challenging – 16 Women Artists from around the World, exhibition catalogue, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2021, p. 239, illustrated.
Boon Hui Tan, ‘Arpita Singh’, We Do Not Dream Alone, exhibition catalogue, Asia Society, New York, 2020, p. 93, pl. 31, illustrated.

‘At the back of every conversation with Arpita one senses something unspoken, something elusive and mysterious below the surface of a simple exchange of words. The world of the child and the primitive world of folk painting meet in her world of magic. But there is one difference: Arpita is neither a child nor a villager. She is a young woman painter who has studied the techniques of painting and is married to a painter; her friends are painters and sculptors. She has chosen to express herself largely through the medium of painting and so her work is conscious and sophisticated rather than naïve. It is the subtle balance she maintains between the consciousness of what she is doing and the unconscious act of painting that provides the dynamics of her role as woman, as painter, and consequently of the viewer who participate in her work.’ (Pria Karunakar, ‘Arpita Singh’, Lalit Kala Contemporary 15, New Delhi, February 1973, p. 25)

Although written several years before The Ritual was painted, Pria Karunakar’s perceptive analysis of Arpita Singh’s approach to painting is one that remains relevant throughout the artist’s career. Now well into her seventh decade of painting, Singh’s inclusion in an exhibition of sixteen global female artists over the age of seventy at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2021, and in the Asia Society New York’s inaugural Triennial exhibition of artists from Asia, focusing on artists whose work capture the complex diversity of cultures present in Contemporary Art today, is a testament to the significance of this unassuming artist.

Arpita Singh was born in Baranagar in Bengal, before India went through Partition in 1947. She moved from Kolkata (then Calcutta) to New Delhi after the death of her father at the age of ten. Her entry into art school (at the School of Art, at the Delhi Polytechnic), was largely due to her school principal convincing Arpita’s mother that her daughter excelled at making charts and may therefore benefit from formal training in drawing. Post art school, she spent four years working as a designer at the Weavers Service Centre in the mid 1960s; a period that was influential in establishing a connection for her with pattern, ornamentation and ‘folk’ forms. Over the years, she has developed a distinctive visual language and style, intermingling history and myth, fantasy and reality. Hers is a unique approach of silently observing the complexities, and often inequalities, of the world around her, and translating them onto her canvas, using a highly intelligent and sophisticated combination of forms, colours, brushwork and composition.

Throughout her career, the woman remains a consistent theme for the artist, often re-incarnating herself to play multiple roles, sometimes within the same picture frame. Though she is operating from a feminine perspective, Arpita and her other female contemporaries distanced themselves from ‘ideological dogmas including feminism, grappling with the peculiarities of their own personal and political experiences to negotiate a way forward.’ (Roobina Karode, ‘Lost Rivers, Origami, and the Immersive Aesthetics of Arpita Singh’, Another Energy, exhibition catalogue, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2021, p. 245) The perception of the female having to fulfill several roles simultaneously, is a social construct that obviously resonated with the artist, and yet, she remained unconvinced of assuming a purely gendered stance.

Several of Arpita’s works feature the reality faced by older Indian women with unabashed candour. She remains guided by empathy for her fellow women and ‘remains entrenched in female subjectivity.’ (ibid.) In the current work, a group of bubble-gum pink, older, somewhat primordial female figures are engaged in various activities. In the upper right, is a writhing, multi-armed female figure, similar to the several multi-armed female deities from the Hindu pantheon. The artist consciously eschews the tenets of perspective in order to maximise the visual impact of the large, ungainly forms: ‘... the rolls and wrinkles of her flesh soften her forms while forcing the viewer to confront her sheer physical reality.’ (Boon Hui Tan, ‘Arpita Singh’, We Do Not Dream Alone, exhibition catalogue, Asia Society, New York, 2020, p. 92) The painting itself, as suggested by the title and the setting, examines the notion of sacrifice in primitive or traditional societies, and the multi-armed figure in particular, brings into consideration, the sacrifices, both tangible and intangible, often required by women, as they withstand societal pressures to assume multiple functions.

As Arpita herself says, ‘Sometimes I use lines from some favourite poem which has become identified with a painting. Sometimes the numbers and letters symbolise the quotidian to me. But even more than that I love scripts – especially foreign scripts – scripts that I cannot read. I feel that some magic is going to be there. It is the same with all the vratas – the special rituals observed by women in Bengal for the welfare for their families, world prosperity and other female aspirations. There is something so beautiful, magical and mysterious in them.’ (In conversation with Srimati Lal, Arpita Singh, exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 1992, unpaginated) The current assemblage of utensils, tools, ingredients and fresh produce, may well be associated with both these indigenous traditions that she was preoccupied with at the time, or may simply represent a more classical version of a modern-day woman’s domestic domain.

The multi-armed female also appears in another painting titled The Eternal Repose, from 1997. In both works, she personifies the various avatars women are expected to assume. As a wife, mother, daughter, artist and home- maker herself, it is an aspect of society that Arpita felt a particular affinity toward. ‘Representing women and their surroundings, the mess and the conundrum of the everyday, the daily rites and preoccupations, dreams and desires, Singh alluded to a world “in the making and unmaking.” Set against the utopian visions of modernism and the celebration of male valour, only a few women artists, including Singh, were then exploring on-the-ground realities and painting the intimate in a language often deceptively attractive, loaded with personal and collective stories.’ (Roobina Karode, op. cit.)

Arpita’s canvas is carefully built up with thick areas of pigment applied on a textured yellow ground. Her paint surface is never smooth, but is made up of several layers; some hidden, some partially visible, but all equally important parts of the larger whole. A repeating decorative pattern, so characteristic of her work, is seen along the lower edge of the painting, and the right edge of the painting includes text, suggestive of ancient times, superimposed on a second pattern depicting a water body. These ‘background motifs’ or patterns are extremely relevant for the artist’s visual language. ‘She refers to them as signs, as symbols in an unpredictable journey in her art. They express the diverse tremors that blip on her radar-line imagination. The motifs can be organic forms, natural phenomena that she witnesses, graphic material from the intrusive visual culture that jostles our consciousness, things done by other artists.’ (Ella Datta, Signposts of a Journey: Paintings by Arpita Singh, exhibition catalogue, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2007, p. 9) The surface integrates various streams of thinking – whether fictional, mythical, personal, or dream-like, and these are often not planned, but present themselves spontaneously through a reading of the surface and the brushstrokes. A seemingly naïvely painted, ordinary domestic scene, transforms itself into a pertinent socio-cultural statement, thereby empowering the figures as archetypes that warrant more intense reflection.

Fellow artist Nilima Sheikh, in an essay written after a series of conversations with Arpita Singh, explains the evolution of Arpita’s women. ‘Arpita paints the ageing woman – as icon, as protagonist, baring the voluminous post-menopausal sexuality of her body, as cavernous as it is vulnerable. The Kalighat prototype of the middle-class housewife with her potential for taking on any of the roles assigned to her by the male fantasy – from the goddess of fecundity to the sly unfaithful wife – is taken on by Arpita and upturned. The fantasies and fears this time around are ours. To outdo the Kalighat seductress our ageing protagonist wears a pink brassiere wistfully holding a paper boat trophy against the seascape inscribed on her belly.... There are unnerving moments: when a veil of subterfuge is lifted from the fecund burgeoning of the ageing body to reveal an androgynous icon of mortality, a human...