Indian painter Arpita Singh has died in New Delhi at 89, ending a career spanning more than six decades. Her paintings moved between abstraction and figures drawn from everyday life and Hindu narratives. Exhibitions in London and at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art had brought different periods of her work to wider audiences.
Indian painter Arpita Singh has died in New Delhi at 89. Her husband, painter Paramjit Singh, confirmed her death. Across more than six decades of work, she became known for figurative paintings in which ordinary people appear alongside figures from Hindu narratives and references to Indian history.[1], [2]
Born in West Bengal in 1937, Singh moved to Delhi in 1946. She graduated from Delhi Polytechnic in 1959, having studied with Biren De and Sailoz Mookherjea. During her education she encountered work by European modernists including Kandinsky, Klee and Chagall. Art dealer Kekoo Gendhy was an early supporter.[1]
Her abstract paintings of the 1970s and 1980s used dots and dashes. By the late 1980s, figures had again become prominent. In the 1990 painting Devi Pistol Wali, a many-armed woman holds a pistol alongside a sword-carrying man. Singh discouraged reducing her pictures to a single explanation.[1]
The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art presented a retrospective in 2019. Serpentine, the London exhibition institution, devoted a show to Singh in 2025. Her work also appeared in the Centre Pompidou’s exhibition of women in abstraction and the Gwangju Biennale in 2021, followed by India’s Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2022.[1]
