Arpita Singh at Bose Pacia Modern - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Despite the popular vogue for all things Indian, contemporary art from the subcontinent has remained a relative rarity in of recent origin York. This exhibition of new paintings and watercolors by the Delhi-based artist Arpita Singh helps fill in the gap. Although Singh, 60 has an extensive exhibition record in the two India and Europe, this is her first solo present to view in America. She is a of symbolic narratives, adept at compressing meaning into a small number of highly charged thing perceiveds and situations which recur from work to work.

Many of her images portray a woman-centered world, none perhaps more beautifully than the spare watercolor Five Women (1997) Against an olive-green surface of land bordered in yellow, Singh arranges her figures in sum of two units rows. The first two women are r outlines sole seen within circular frames that place them at individual remove, as if in memory. Between them Singh interposes an airplane with three men inside, suggesting not only travel but loss and the intrusion of a specifically male world and its mobilities into this clos circle. From here the women gain greater solidity, culminating in the final figure, obscur by means of drapery and accompanied by a great owl Although the artist appear to bes to depict five different women here (perhaps a family?), a certain quantity of sort of chronological progression is hinted some journey from hurt and los to vigor and wisdom. Although the unobtrusive size of Singh's watercolors (most measure 14 through 20 inches) may recall traditional Indian miniatures, for the Western viewer the experience is closer to the intimacy of reading a diary. Her absolute ascendency of the technical aspects of the medium adds to the works' delightfulness and tenders a stark contrast to her significantly larger paintings, where size overwhelms the private controls and makes her handling have the appearance finicky.

If the world of women provides single important theme for Singh, that of male fantasy provides another. Glimpsed in the watercolors repose and A Policeman's Dream (both 1997) are spaces where the strict characters of the waking world are left behind and the material part is free to follow the whims of desire. In the latter work, an exemplar of male authority -- still clutching his fire-arm -- drifts off to slumber on a sheet patterned with flowers. His luxuriant dreams, depicted against a striking gold clod consist of mysterious interchanges between male and female figures, a four-armed naked goddess, perched atop a lotus capsule lifts a transparent veil from her face across from a double of the policeman; sum of two units sleepers are linked by a car shuttling between them end a landscape of floating, unconnect words. The border, alternating flowers and airplanes, is a neat visual summary of the latent sexual interplay of the main representation As with all of Singh's greatest in quantity compelling images, the power of this work lies in its mediation of the specific (Indian folk traditions of popular prints, sign paintings and the like) with the universal (sensitively imagined human stories).

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