Arpita Singh: A milestone in a modernist's journey

In our many years of friendship I have never heard Arpita Singh talk about her art; it is a subject she studiously avoids

In a heavily-loaded art season there is one show that unquestionably outshines all others in its ambition, scale and range. This is the five month-long retrospective devoted to the Delhi-based, 81-year-old artist Arpita Singh that opened January-end at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA). About 220 works spanning six decades of her extraordinarily vivid and vibrant oeuvre are displayed in a series of interlinked rooms and galleries — some 18,000 sq ft of space — that counterpoise a woman’s inner journey with the vicissitudes of Indian life at large.

In explaining why Arpita Singh was chosen for this signal honour,