Arpita Singh

Arpita Singh was born Arpita Dutta in 1937 in Baranagar, outside Calcutta, and left with her mother and brother for Delhi in 1946. She trained at the Delhi Polytechnic from 1954 to 1959, then worked at the Weavers’ Service Centre and later on a government programme for cottage industries, where she met weavers and traditional artists. Pattern, craft and densely worked surfaces stayed in her pictures for good.

In 1962 she married the painter Paramjit Singh, and the same year showed with The Unknown, a group of Delhi Polytechnic graduates. Her first solo exhibition was at Kunika Chemould in 1972.

The early work is mostly ink and watercolour on paper, often in black and white. From the 1980s she painted women going about their days among teapots, flowers, flags, pillows and animals, in pinks and blues used with restraint. Child Bride with Swan and Girl Smoking Cigarette both date from 1985. In the 1990s she moved to oil on canvas, and the pictures took on harder subjects: hatred, injustice and the lot of the girl child, often through a woman and a girl together. Her nudes show vulnerability, not display. Miniature painting and folk forms stayed close throughout.

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art gave her a retrospective in 2019, and her work later hung at the Centre Pompidou, the Barbican and the Serpentine. She received the Padma Bhushan in 2011. Her daughter, the artist Anjum Singh, died in 2020. Arpita Singh died in New Delhi on 9 November 2026, aged 89.