NEW DELHI: Arpita Singh, the modernist painter whose densely worked canvases put the female figure at the centre of India's social upheaval, died in Delhi on Monday, November 9, at 89.
Her husband, the artist Paramjit Singh, told PTI that she died at Fortis Hospital, where she had been admitted after her health declined over three days. "She had heart and lung related issues for some years now. However, she was actively working," he said.
The Vadehra Art Gallery, which represented her, said she died on the way to hospital.
Born in West Bengal in 1937, Singh moved to Delhi with her family in 1946, shortly before Partition, and studied at the School of Art at Delhi Polytechnic from 1954 to 1959, where she met Paramjit. Their daughter, the artist Anjum Singh, died of cancer in 2020.
Her style refused to sit inside a movement. Four years spent learning traditional embroidery, particularly Kantha, at the Weavers' Service Centre in the 1960s shaped the white dashes that fill her canvases like stitches, and gave her pictures their unmistakably contemporary texture. Her subjects were women, soldiers, cars, guns and crowds — the ordinary furniture of a violent century.
Singh received the Padma Bhushan in 2011 and the Lalit Kala Akademi Fellowship in 2014. A retrospective was held at Delhi's Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in 2019, and "Remembering" at London's Serpentine Gallery in 2025 was her first institutional solo show outside India. "Unfolding" is currently on at Talwar Gallery in New York.
(With inputs from PTI and media reports)