{"id":70224,"date":"2025-03-20T01:27:55","date_gmt":"2025-03-19T16:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/artanddesign\/2025\/mar\/19\/arpita-singh-remembering-review-serpentine-north-gallery-london"},"modified":"2025-03-20T01:27:55","modified_gmt":"2025-03-19T16:27:55","slug":"arpita-singh-remembering-review-beautiful-chaos-reigns-in-indias-tumultuous-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=70224","title":{"rendered":"Arpita Singh: Remembering review \u2013 beautiful chaos reigns in India\u2019s tumultuous past"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Serpentine North gallery, London<br \/><\/strong>Hugely complex and infinitely layered figurative paintings dominate in a show that feels part-comic book, part Chagall dreamscape, part folk-art<\/p>\n<p>Every painting in Arpita Singh\u2019s debut UK exhibition feels like a desperate attempt to make sense of a tumultuous past, to memorialise the endless turbulence of life, politics and history. Singh, born in 1937, matured as an artist at a time of huge social upheaval in India. Amid states of national emergency, rising international tensions and nuclear tests, the art that came out of India after 1975 \u2013 brilliantly documented in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/artanddesign\/2024\/dec\/03\/the-imaginary-institution-of-india-review-barbican\">Barbican\u2019s Imaginary Institution of India<\/a> exhibition last year \u2013 became a way of documenting, resisting and surviving.<\/p>\n<p>But Singh\u2019s work isn\u2019t hugely literal, nor particularly angry. Instead, her intense, colourful figurative paintings feel like a glimpse of interior life, of emotion and trauma in times of struggle. They are hugely complex, infinitely layered and filled with historical allusions, military symbolism and daily life. The paintings are stacked vertically with imagery \u2013 not laid out on a single plane like a traditional western landscape painting, but with multiple ideas piled up and across the canvas. You\u2019re almost never looking at just one thing, one scene, but multiple images knitted together. It\u2019s part-comic book, part-Chagall dreamscape, part-folk art.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/artanddesign\/2025\/mar\/19\/arpita-singh-remembering-review-serpentine-north-gallery-london\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Serpentine North gallery, LondonHugely complex and infinitely layered figurative paintings dominate in a show that feels part-comic book, part Chagall dreamscape, part folk-artEvery painting in Arpita Singh\u2019s debut UK exhibition feels like a desperate &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546,91,71,62,1554,3266,61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-art-and-design","category-culture","category-india","category-painting","category-serpentine-gallery","category-south-and-central-asia"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4650"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70224"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70225,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70224\/revisions\/70225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}