Artist of the Collection · New Delhi

Arpita Singh

Figuration, memory and the inner lives of women

Across paintings, drawings and watercolours, Arpita Singh brings together personal memory, everyday objects and the wider pressures of contemporary life.

View a painting in the collection

Artwork by Arpita Singh in the Saraswati Foundation collection

The artist

A personal language of images

Singh combines a modernist sensibility with references to miniature painting and folk traditions. Her densely layered compositions hold intimate, domestic details alongside the unease and complexity of public life.

Awards & honours

1991

Parishad Samman

Sahitya Kala Parishad, New Delhi.

1991

Kalidas Samman

Awarded in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.

2011

Padma Bhushan

One of India’s highest civilian honours.

Biography

A practice shaped by observation

Born in 1937 in what is now Bangladesh, Arpita Singh moved to Delhi and studied at the School of Art at Delhi Polytechnic from 1954 to 1959. After graduating, she worked with the Government of India’s cottage industries programme, an experience that brought her into close contact with craft traditions and textiles.

Singh’s work is known for its figurative language and layered surfaces. She draws from Indian miniature painting and folk art while developing a distinctly personal vocabulary of women, objects, maps, flowers and fragments of remembered experience. Her work has been the subject of a major retrospective at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in 2019 and an institutional solo exhibition at the Serpentine in 2025.

Biography based on institutional and gallery profiles.

Selected exhibitions