Is the market ready to acknowledge Arpita Singh as a master?
Like her subjects, Arpita Singh has always been around, a key element but never the central attraction of a group show/ auction/ modern art retrospective. Yet, canny buyers who recognised her worth as early as the eighties have ensured that there is very little by Arpita Singh that is available in the market. Like Nilima Sheikh, her paintings sell out almost as soon as a show opens, and works are regularly auctioned at Bonhams, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, but the buzz is always muted — perhaps to glorify her liquid worth would be to do her disservice. For Singh is the neighbourhood aunty and holocaust survivor rolled into one, a Miss Marple of observations of community life, a chronicler of loss and anguish, weaving them into urban myths with garlands of flowers and discreet tea ceremonies.
But make no mistake — behind that veneer of gentility, Arpita Singh’s paintings are a scathing social commentary on the violence we confront daily, when the airplanes buzzing around her skies might explode into buildings, when it is difficult to tell whether soldiers are protectors or killers, when the seemingly innocent is a trap into which the guileless find themselves ensnared routinely. She builds up her canvas in multiple layers, inherited from the country’s miniature tradition, treating each as a storyteller might. At first glance, or to the unsuspecting, her works might resemble something idyllic, but behind the manicured hedges is a prophesy of evil so potent as to make you flinch. In placing the demonic in her lived suburbia, she brings the violence chillingly close to home.
In a world that loves labels, it is difficult to find one that can contain her. Her concern for women is clear, yet she can manipulate lust and desire, tainting it with avarice and politics instead of the merely decadent; she abjures violence, but makes no apology for its intrusion into the middle class household. She uses chairs and stairs and billowing curtains as metaphors, the disjointed quality of what art critic Ella Datta calls “fractured reality” building towards a seemingly hallucinatory experience.
As 2010 winds down, it just might be the year that will turn the quietly reticent New Delhi artist into a national icon. At Vadehra Art Gallery, a major show, Cobweb opens on November 18, and next month Saffronart promises to put the artist’s massive 24 x 13 ft mural, Wish Dream, on the cover of its winter auction catalogue. In so many ways, Wish Dream is a representation of all that Arpita Singh has worked towards. The colours are luminous (where she has tended, at times, to be garish), the canvas unfolds with a sea of people going about their chores and lives, there is the now-familiar central figure suggestive of religious and even modern mythic iconography in popular kitsch and poster art, yet the veil of suburbia teems with the possibility of carnage. Mostly, though, it is potent with the possibility of marking Arpita Singh’s first work likely to cross the threshold price of Rs10 crore – and perhaps substantially more – not just on account of its size but because it is representative of the multiple layerings that she has consciously arrived at on her canvases.
This, at least, is the way the market reads her prices. The more layers – stories but also morals – one reads in each work, the more complex its rendering, the more likely it is to raise her value — one reason why her oil on canvas paintings outstrip her watercolours (which many collectors are more fond of for the intimacy of each work) in value terms. The watercolours attempt a similar layering and the figures appear more heroically constructed. These watercolours fetch a price between Rs3 lakh and Rs10 lakh, while her oils in a similar size could easily command two and even three times that value. But Singh’s oil canvases typically tend to be larger, as a result of which prices average Rs20 lakh and upwards, The Eternal Repose having fetched Rs81 lakh at Saffronart’s September 2010 auction. With the spotlight now firmly on her, Arpita Singh might have to settle from a side player to the central figure in the market dynamics of contemporary art — ready or not.
These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which the writer is associated.
kishoresingh_22@hotmail.com