‘Her Art Survives Her Life’: Indian Painter Arpita Singh Dies

The artist Arpita Singh, whose canvases traced the inner lives of Indian women across six decades, died on 9 November at Fortis Hospital in New Delhi. She was eighty-nine.

Her husband, the painter Paramjit Singh, told the Press Trust of India that she had suffered from heart and lung problems for years but had kept working until her health deteriorated three days before her death.

Born Arpita Dutta in Baranagar, Bengal, in 1937, she moved to Delhi with her family in 1946. She received a diploma in fine arts from Delhi Polytechnic in 1959, where she discovered Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Marc Chagall through books on European modernism. A job as a textile designer at the government’s Weavers’ Service Centre introduced her to the panel-by-panel storytelling and patterned borders of pattachitra scrolls, as well as the repeated stitching of kantha quilts – elements that would become defining features of her painting.

Her first solo show, at Kunika Chemould in New Delhi in 1972, left her feeling her technique was failing her. ‘I felt I was facing technical problems with my work, and there were hurdles’, she told the Indian Express. So she went back to the beginning: for most of the decade, she worked almost entirely on paper, in ink and black poster paint, filling small sheets with lines, grids and dots – ‘like practicing handwriting’, she told the critic Uma Nair in 2005.

The oil paintings that followed set an ambiguous female protagonist among cars, airplanes, soldiers, flowers and fragments of her own handwriting. Singh told the Guardian that events ‘come into my painting like the way light comes as colour’, and told the Times of India that she painted ‘real women’ rather than glamorous ones.

The 16-panel Wish Dream (2000–01) sold for $2.24 million at Saffronart in 2010, then a record for a female Indian artist. The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art staged a major retrospective of her work, Submergence: In the Midst of Here and There, in 2019, and her work featured in Women in Abstraction at the Pompidou Centre in 2021 and the Barbican’s The Imaginary Institution of India in 2024.

Her first institutional solo exhibition outside India came only last year: Remembering, featuring more than 160 works at Serpentine North, curated by Tamsin Hong with Hans Ulrich Obrist, who called her an inspiration to ‘five generations of Indian contemporary artists’. Singh called the show ‘a pleasure, an honour, and a surprise to me’, and told Obrist in the catalogue: ‘I always paint the things I see and experience every day.’

News of her death was met with tributes from the Indian artworld. The curator Uma Nair called her ‘the high priestess of contemporary Indian art’; Shireen Gandhy, whose family gallery showed Singh early on, wrote that she had gone ‘taking a small piece of our hearts with her’. The poet Ashok Vajpeyi wrote that ‘her art survives her life and would now create a new posthumous life’.

Unfolding, which features new work from Singh, runs at Talwar Gallery, New York, until 27 February 2027.

Unfolding, Talwar Gallery, New York, 26 September 2026 – 27 February 2027