A spotlight on India’s most accomplished contemporary photo artist

Born in New Delhi in 1960, Dayanita Singh is recognized as one of India’s most accomplished contemporary photographers.

Making books is now her passion and she has collaborated with the prestigious Steidl press to create a number of titles, including the seven-volume ‘Sent A Letter’, named one of the 200 pivotal artworks produced in the past 25 years in Phaidon Press’s ‘Defining Contemporary Art’.

She reveals: “Many writers have influenced my work greatly. Some I could only read, some that I had the privilege of traveling and conversing with. They have influenced the shifts in my work and often my work has been addressed to them (in the book 'Sent a Letter').”

Her works have been presented in exhibitions throughout the world, most recently as a solo show at the Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo. In 2009, the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid organized a retrospective of her work that subsequently traveled to Amsterdam and Bogota. Her images of ‘File Rooms’ were featured prominently in the exhibition, entitled ‘Illuminazione’ that formed the centerpiece of the Venice Biennale earlier this year.

The celebrated artist has received many awards like the Prince Claus Award by the Netherlands government in 2008 for ‘her image of outstanding quality, providing a well-articulated view of contemporary India, and for introducing a new aesthetic into Indian photography’.

Her new body of works, entitled ‘House of Love’, is on view at Nature Morte, Gurgaon. Excerpts from it have been exhibited at the Peabody Museum, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Frieze Art Fair, London. The book by the same name (with texts by Aveek Sen; Publisher: Peabody Museum Press and Radius Press) is available at the gallery during the exhibition. This is her fifth solo with Nature Morte, the first being the exhibition 'Family Portraits' in 1998.