NEW DELHI: Modernist artist Arpita Singh, widely known for her detailed figurative works, died here at Fortis Hospital from age-related ailments on Monday, her husband and artist Paramjit Singh told PTI.
She was 89.
"She had heart and lung related issues for some years now. However, she was actively working. Her health dipped in the last three days and was admitted to the hospital," Paramjit added.
Her cremation will be held at 2 pm at Lodhi Crematorium on Sunday.
She is survived by her husband. Their only daughter, also an artist, Anjum Singh died in 2020 from cancer.
Singh is known for her extensive body of figurative work, generally centred around a female figure, that was reflective of social upheaval and humanitarian crises of her times.
She received the Padma Bhushan in 2011 and the Lalit Kala Akademi Fellowship in 2014 for her contribution to the world of art.
The art fraternity mourned her death.
Art curator Uma Nair called Singh the "high priestess of contemporary Indian art" and the "female M F Husain of the female arc". She noted that the beauty of her work was in the way how she "wove violence and chaos and patriarchal mores all so softly.
"The power of the narrative was her elixir, where the world becomes a quilt of characters who play their own parts... Her work in the early days at the Weavers Centre gave her an imagery that created connotations in textile in contemporary discourse," Nair wrote.
She added that her ability to balance the human figures with predominantly abstract compositions on canvas and paper, "show her precision and harmonic balance created principally with a reliance on contours so as to lay the formal foundations of her oeuvre to create an aesthetic bridge to her evolution".
"Her essence has been a serious curiosity about form, depth and space, and a playful improvisation—a willingness to suspend certainty in her search for the novel in terms of life’s leanings," Nair said.
Ashok Vajpeyi, poet and managing trustee of Raza Foundation, wrote in a social media post that Singh's "deeply agonised vision ranged from an almost epic apprehension of contemporary violence to the lyrical celebration of life in its numerous hues and shades.
"She created an art, intense and vibrant, which is both an aesthetic testimony of our times as well as stark interrogation. Her love of life, poetry, human companionship and deep commitment to human and artistic solidarity enacted itself in a rare luminousity in her art," he wrote on Instagram.
"Her art survives her life and would now create a new posthomous life of itself. The loss of Arpita Singh is a huge loss for the whole world of Indian Culture," Vajpeyi added.
(With inputs from PTI)
