Redefining her role

Anjum Singh's sellout exhibition identifies a young market

One of the occupational hazards of an installation artist is that the creative interaction never quite stops. The relationship with the buyer/collector extends up to right how and where the work will finally "get installed".

That's what Anjum Singh, who is a painter by training, is discovering after selling two of her first experimental pieces at an ongoing show in New Delhi's Pallette gallery (till April 2).

One of her works, "Cola Bloom", made out of plastic cast from cola bottles in the shape of a desert cactus, is to become a garden sculpture for a Delhi-based home. The second, a floor installation made of sliced plastic tubes, will turn into a table-top for a Chennai-based collector. "It's part of the process but it's new to me," says Singh.

But, broadly speaking, these installations are just a small extension of an idea Singh has been working on for two years; the urban chaos that spills into the daily grind of our lives. Fast cars, pollution, consumerism and its effect on human behaviour.

In short, she is an urban landscapist, and her work "Spill Again" and "Sha-dow Blue" map how she experiences the undercurrents of a changing India in its race to become a sun in the global village.

Critics are quick to point out that her works hardly "look Indian". Singh, who trained from Kala Bhavan, Shantiniketan, College of Art, New Delhi and Washington's Corocan School of Art, comes to her defence about her works which are sometimes as effusive as rangoli colours.

"I have always lived and grown up in a city. My reality is not rural upbringing." Her own fear is her work is being looked upon as utilitarian art.

Clearly, Singh belongs to a world different from her artist parents. Fame came to Arpita and Paramjit Singh after decades of hard work. Her exhibition is proof of changing times "" on the first day, all her nine works were sold, predominantly to young collectors.

This is the first time that her entire exhibition got sold, something that has taken her by surprise as well. Among the buyers was a young woman who bought "Shadows of Blue" for Rs 1.5 lakh.

This was a birthday gift to her beau who attended the opening, and the lady organised a bouquet of flowers and card to be placed beside the painting. Singh and her works belong to this generation and age.