2O25. 2 – Arpita Singh, b.1937

 ‘This map is faulty, do not follow it’ is tucked into the border of My Lollipop City: Gemini Rising. In ‘Remembering’, the artist’s first solo outside of India, we are given permission to soar/drift/scuttle through an entire career. It is a complete pleasure, from the very moment after you pass this slightly confusing font.

Singh’s use of text often disarms and enables her viewers, who, with such an injunction, are given license to look freely. There is such confidence in such a confession, or rather such a thesis of faultiness and not following. Indeed self-assuredness is writ large throughout, alongside which it is hard not to feel like an imperfect viewer. But this is faulty, she affirms, as if to say this map doesn’t actually work, as if to say this is a painting, and that it might not have an entirely objective utility or, further, be completely representative of anything at all. It is a sentiment that makes me want to start all reviews in the same vein; this text is faulty, do not follow it. 

I took great pleasure in not following. Indeed the works delight in an interiority that doesn’t offer you the ability to follow, or not to my eyes.  Not if we render ‘understanding’ as a comprehensive act. In fact the works are often thoroughly unclear, their suggestions not fixed, or fixable by scrutiny. And this is where they triumph. The eye is asked to travel up and down the paintings, but not with any expectations of structure or outcome. We are asked to look at, and at times look beyond a real or implied border, to look at a word, or a reflection of a word, or a repetition of a word. Or a figure, then the doppleganger, then the shadow. In this way Singh’s work has an oneiric quality; it brims with the nearly possible but entirely imagined. The conjured outcome, like good fiction, grips us for all the resonance (however idiosyncratic) it contains.

In the middle of a park, in that near silence of musuem hum, you glide across six prolific decades, drifting through abstraction, figuration and the influence of court paintings, folk narrative, and personal histories in ink, watercolour, pastel, etching, and oil. Remembering is retrospective, forward concerned, summative all at once. It is the show of a lifetime.

Giacometti, Van Gogh, Gormley, Chagall? As one slowly realises; Arpita Singh.

Two of the many mangoes that recur throughout.

As you orbit, you realise you are in the most capable and imaginative hands. You forget the need to follow and instead you do as bidden, you think more of the faultiness at the heart of painting, of the process of working a flat surface into something other than itself.

Whether in abstraction or figuration, on paper or canvas, the work feels immediately itself, and despite how tempting it is to slip Singh alongside the big names of the 20th century, her output seems able to exist in graceful independence.

If you have time, this is a wonderful use of it at the Serpentine (north) until the 27th of July. (Although be warned, there is no lime bike dock nearby, if like me, you thought, in this order: gallery in a park, lime bike).