Several women appear in Arpita Singh’s 1989 painting Munna apa’s garden. One, middle-aged, waters her flowers, while another on the right watches on through floral curtains. Through a window in the center-top of the painting, a woman appears bare-chested. These figures, windows, and flowers appear in canvases throughout Singh’s career. “I always paint the things I see and experience every day,” the artist said in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, for the show’s catalogue. “They’re almost the same every day.”
“Remembering,” at the Serpentine North, is Arpita Singh’s first institutional solo exhibition outside India. The exhibition surveys a 60-year career with an emphasis on Singh’s unique approach to figuration and world-building. While Singh is one of the best-known painters in India, international recognition has been slower to arrive. The Serpentine show comes on the heels of important recent shows of Indian art in the U.K., such as the widely praised 2024 exhibition “Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998” at the Barbican Centre, which showed works by Singh in the context of close Indian peers and collaborators such as Nilima Sheikh, Nalini Malani, and Madhvi Parekh.
