Spotlight on a senior artist and her oeuvre courtesy Grosvenor, London

A major group exhibition at London based Grosvenor Gallery maps trajectories of contemporary Indian art where both the ‘conventional’ and the ‘radical’ intersect through ‘Narrations, Quotations & Commentaries’, as the title suggests, ‘within’ artworks as well as ‘through’ them.

Among the artists featuring in the show, Arpita Singh has worked from and around her observations of immediate surroundings and also carrying a universal touch from the broader feminine perspective sans making any virtue of stark feminism. The concurrently suggestive and candid, melancholic still colorful quintessence of her works compel the viewer to pause and wander through a maze of imaginations, ideas and complex conclusions.

Each one seems to narrate and trace a journey from the sensitive artist’s soul to the world outside, encapsulating the little memories of childhood to blossoming of youth to a deeper understanding drawn from age and experience. Just to state that her practice is narrative would be rather simplistic.

Concerned by the problems faced each passing day by women across the world in general and those in India, in particular the artist paints an array of emotions, which she looks to exchange with these subjects –from suffering to hope and from sorrow to joy – offering a kaleidoscopic view of the ongoing communication that she maintains with them.

Her paintings are akin to blueprints of a complex urban experiential map that she charts out of a range of metaphors, myths, conscious stances, subconscious utterances, fantasy, and reality. They can be termed her personal journals, but for the fact that their pages are dotted with vivacious visual anecdotes instead of text. The way in which she employs perspective and the narrative, her practice seems steeped in the magnificent miniaturist traditions and an apt reflection of her background.

Coupled with modernist techniques that she uses, Arpita Singh foregrounds a host of other painterly devices, resorting to skillful patterning, profuse usage of decorative motifs and different historical sources.