Confluence of colours

Artist Arpita Singh's new exhibition of drawings offers a complex view of the world

Arpita Singh's new exhibition of watercolours and drawings is subtle, sharp, ironic and melancholic. It is a great reminder that art can say as much with a few well-placed lines as a writer can with a few hundred words.

On view at her solo exhibition are 60 drawings and paintings from 2005 to 2015, a breakaway from her characteristic big oil paintings. The monochromatic, small-format works also include poems, texts and maps. Besides, 45 sketch books from 1990 to 2015 are also on display.

Singh is known for her enigmatic works that offer a complex view of the world. Her influences range from politics, myth, memory and the inner lives of women to Bengali Kantha work and patachitra. She's a Lalit Kala Academy fellow - one of only two woman fellows since the organisation's inception. In 2010, her monumental mural, Wish Dream, became one of the most expensive Indian paintings in the world. She's formed one of the most successful ongoing artist collaborations in India with artists Nilima Sheikh, Madhvi Parekh and Nalini Malani - yet, she's always managed to stay under the radar.

In Singh's paintings, the feminine figure has morphed over the years - moving from young women to raunchy middle-aged bodies to the figures we see here who are mirroring perhaps the fragilities of her own ageing body. The men, too, have mellowed - in the latest sketches, instead of wearing their usual black suits, the men are also mostly old, flabby, alone and nude. Although these sketches are mostly preparatory images for her oils, they are dense and stretch across the paper like memories and skin - no longer taut but expansive. Singh plays with geometrical fragmented forms that fill the page and backgrounds that look like dense newspapers or maps. It's also very easy to figure out in which year each sketch was made because Singh's preoccupations and themes change.

One untitled work shows a naked woman with roses blooming inside her. The figure is drawn twice in subtly different colours in such a way that the old woman covers the page -like an old skeletal Pieta. Another, titled Catching Fireflies, shows the side view of an old woman, her body in motion and her inner organs showing. Two sketches, both called Fossils, suggest the impression of a head and crouching bodies behind stone. Another piece, Woman Friendly Taxi, offers an ambiguous commentary on the security of women in Delhi.

Paper Bird, Paper Woman and Scratching One's Back, from 2014, has figures filled with dense text and crosswords, folded to resemble origami images. Singh says these images suggest that the information about the figures is received from the media and they bear the marks of cutting, crushing and the flatness of paper.

But it's the watercolour paintings from 2015 that offer a sly commentary on current events and the sense of insecurity that surrounds us. Palmyra, Tailors & Drapers shows a beheaded man and a hijab. Singh laughs while discussing this painting, adding, "They excel at draping women in hijabs and cutting off men's heads." Desert Wail shows a dense map of the ancient Silk Route, which has run through the desert for centuries. At the bottom of the dense painting, you can see the dead body of the archeologist killed in Palmyra.

Others centre on India. In Four Men, politicians in white kurta pajamas sit and talk; while Chasing Away an Animal shows a dead cow. Leaping Bridge references to the Partition and the Ramayana. It shows an unnatural line running through a map and dividing it into two sections. "This is how Partition divided the country - the Line of Control even cut through people's kitchens," says Singh. The golden deer from the Ramayan leaps across the border. From a distance, the picture appears as though it is a patchwork fabric with cross-stitch; or a barbed wire; or even an ECG reading - depending on your perspective.

In case it seems that the exhibition is only melancholic, it isn't. Take, for instance, Butterfly, which looks at women's busy lives with affection. The Kozhikode Series is filled with big palm trees swaying in a fresh breeze that provides a contrast to the contained bodies and political paintings where every space is covered with dense lines and text.

But what has really stayed with me is Singh's uniquely personal look at public issues, and the fearlessness reflected in her work, as she talks about issues that most of us shy away from.