A cluster of small, lemon-yellow islands – each shaped exactly like Cuba – hovers in a milky body of water. Standing between this trio of Cubas, a soldier raises his gun, ready for combat. This straggling fighter watches as, ahead of him, a squadron of his khaki-clad brothers-in-arms attacks an array of drowning victims, their blood-red arms waving for help. Dotted throughout this scene of oceanic carnage are an unexpected array of pink blooms, leaves and trees – signs of life amidst so much trauma. Evoking a militaristic strategy board game, replete with figurine soldiers spread across a map to plan warfare, Arpita Singh’s painting My Lily Pond (2009) is at once absurd, turbulent and beautiful.
Political violence lurks in the background of several other paintings on display in ‘Remembering’, a survey of Singh’s six-decade career at Serpentine North Gallery in London. There’s the steely cool, gun-toting woman in Devi Pistol Wali (1990); the mythical battles from the Bhagavad Gita re-created in Whatever Is Here (2006); a saluting police officer in Couple Having Tea (1992). This looming hostility is no surprise given that the artist was ten years old in 1947 at the time of the Partition of India – a period marked by the displacement of millions of people as British-ruled India was split into the two independent states of India and Pakistan. Singh’s surrealist paintings maintain a sense of reality, grounded in this tumultuous experience, even as they dip into the absurd and mythological.
