Arpita Singh

Arpita Singh died at Fortis Hospital in New Delhi on the morning of Monday 9 November 2026, aged 89. Her husband, Paramjit Singh, told the Press Trust of India that she died of age-related ailments. "She had heart and lung related issues for some years now. However, she was actively working. Her health dipped in the last three days and was admitted to the hospital," he said.

Tributes came quickly from the art world. Roshni Vadehra, who worked with her on the 2025 Serpentine exhibition, said Singh had taught her "to find wit and wonder in the smallest things". The Mumbai gallerist and auctioneer Dadiba Pundole said she was "a woman of her generation who could not be ignored in a predominantly male domain". Funeral arrangements had not been reported in the first coverage.

Arpita Singh was born Arpita Dutta on 22 June 1937 in Baranagar, near Calcutta, in what was then the Bengal Presidency of British India. In 1946, a year before independence, she left the city with her mother and brother and settled in Delhi.

She studied at the Delhi Polytechnic from 1954 to 1959 and graduated with a diploma in fine arts. Among her teachers were Dinkar Kaushik, Biren De and Jaya Appasamy, and among her fellow students was the abstract painter Paramjit Singh, a year ahead of her, whom she married in 1962.

Early work

After graduating, Singh worked as a textile designer at the Weavers' Service Centre under the Ministry of Textiles and then with the Cottage Industries Restoration Programme, where she met traditional artists and weavers. Their patterns and textures fed into her later paintings. In the 1960s she was a founder member of The Unknown, a group formed by alumni of the Delhi Polytechnic fine arts department, which held its first show in New Delhi in 1962. Her first solo exhibition was organised by Roshan Alkazi at Kunika Chemould Gallery, New Delhi, in 1972.

Style

Her early works were mostly watercolours and black and white ink drawings, and she went through a period of abstraction. By the 1980s she was painting women at the centre of richly patterned scenes drawn from Bengali folk art, in a palette dominated by pinks and blues. In the 1990s she turned to oil on canvas and painted a series on women with a girl child, addressing hatred, social injustice and the vulnerability of women and girls.

Exhibitions

She exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (1982), the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1986), the Havana Biennial (1987) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (1993). From 1987 to 1989 she organised and took part in Through the Looking Glass with Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh and Madhvi Parekh, which toured five venues in India. Later shows included a retrospective at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (2019), Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou and Guggenheim Bilbao (2021), Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2022), The Imaginary Institution of India at the Barbican (2024) and Remembering at the Serpentine Galleries in London (2025). Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi represented her from 1994.

Singh married the painter Paramjit Singh in 1962, and the couple lived and worked for many years in Nizamuddin East, New Delhi. Their daughter, Anjum Singh, became an artist and died in 2020.

Singh is regarded as one of the leading figurative painters of post-independence India and one of the few women of her generation to win both critical and commercial success. Her blending of miniature and folk traditions with personal and political narrative, and her steady attention to women's inner lives, influenced younger artists. Her honours included the Parishad Samman (1991), the Kalidas Samman, the Padma Bhushan (2011) and the fellowship of the Lalit Kala Akademi (2014), and her work is held in major museum collections in India and abroad.