‘I spent six years just repeating dots and lines’: the great painter Arpita Singh on a lifetime in art

She has been painting for 60 years – yet it’s taken until now for her to have an exhibition outside her native India. The artist reluctantly takes time out from her studio in order to grant a rare interview

When Arpita Singh’s Remembering opened this week at the Serpentine in London, despite being one of India’s leading artists, it was her first solo institutional show outside her native land in her six-decade-long career. It also marked the first time the Serpentine has given over its main galleries to a show by a south Asian artist. But Singh, who spends most of her waking hours in her Delhi home studio, is muted in her reaction. “Serpentine is a known gallery, so it is a prestigious thing for me,” is about as effusive as she gets.

At 87, Singh is reluctant to give her time to anything that might take her away from her canvas – and that includes this interview. Her vivid, unhinged paintings, chock-a-block with adrift figures, motifs and text often structured by narrow borders crammed with ornament, have won her a devoted following. In an epic Mappa Mundi-like piece, My Lollipop City: Gemini Rising, perspectives jar and scales switch in a way that jauntily recalls storytelling scroll paintings and lavishly detailed miniatures.

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‘I spent six years just repeating dots and lines’: the great painter Arpita Singh on a lifetime in art

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