Artist Arpita Singh dies at 90

Artist Arpita Singh dies at 90. (Credit: Vadehra Art Gallery)

Eminent artist Arpita Singh passed away on Monday morning in Delhi at the age of 90. She breathed her last on the way to the hospital, having succumbed to age-related health complications, Roshini Vadehra, Director at Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery that represents Singh, told The Indian Express.

“She was so much more than an artist I deeply admired. She was equally a friend and a constant source of wonder,” Roshini said.

Her art refused to be categorised into movements or styles and bore a timeless sensibility that captivated viewers through decades and across generations.

Singh at work. (Credit: Vadehra Art Gallery)

Born in West Bengal in 1937, she moved to Delhi with her family in 1946 shortly before Partition. She went on to attend the School of Art at the Delhi Polytechnic (1954-1959), earning a Diploma in Fine Arts. It is here that she met artist Paramjit Singh, whom she later married. Their daughter, artist Anjum Singh, passed away in 2020, following a battle with cancer.

The timeline of her career would ideally put her a little after India’s great modernists, including the Bombay Progressives MF Husain, SH Raza, KH Ara among others.

But her style, inimitably detailed with a penchant for narrative storytelling, made her incredibly contemporary, a quality that is often attributed to the four years spent learning traditional embroidery, particularly Kantha, at the Weavers’ Service Centre in the sixties. Her famous, densely packed white dashes that fill her canvases like micro strokes evoke the repetitive stitch pattern of Kantha.

Her six-decade long career has seen several notable showcases, including a retrospective at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in 2019, Remembering at London’s Serpentine Gallery — her first institutional solo exhibition outside of India — in 2025, and Unfolding, currently underway at Talwar Gallery in New York. Singh was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2011.

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“She taught me not to overthink art or life, to find wit and wonder in the smallest things, to stay curious and to always look at the world with a little more humour and imagination,” Roshini said.