Indian artist Aditi Singh uses painting as a meditative process through which to communicate an affinity with the natural world and its rhythms. Paying attention to form, light, colour, and mark-making, Singh documents a time-based experience of the sublime.
Read MoreBorn in Guwahati, India, Singh is now based in Mumbai. She holds a BA (1998) from Knox College in Illinois, and studied painting at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in 1999, earning her MFA at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in 2001.
Aditi Singh's early artworks are recognised for their exploration of floral and botanical forms, such as Simurgh (2006), Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, (2007), and numerous untitled works presented in her 2010 exhibition, Let it be a heaven of blackbed roses at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai. Depicting restrained studies of flowers ranging from graphic sketches to monochromatic ink renderings, Singh's continued exploration of this subject reflects her attempt to capture a fragile temporality.
On her fascination with flowers, the artist explains, 'at a certain moment a form chooses you and won't leave you in peace... The flowers I am drawn to are not commonplace. They can only survive in extreme climates. They aren't typically meant to decorate, to beautify. And I think perhaps that is what initially attracted me to them, the ephemeral yet tenacious nature of their existence.'
Singh's 'Untitled' ink painting series is a distinctive body of work produced mostly between 2016 and 2018. A departure from the more representational characteristics of her earlier paintings, the 'Untitled' works present fluid, suspended abstract forms reminiscent of a Rorschach test. While at first glance the bleeding contours appear to have been spontaneously poured or spilled, they are carefully composed of numerous layers of ink built up over time, tracked in a log by the artist. This process creates variations in intensity of colour—typically hues of red and indigo—as well as shifts in opacity, which contrast vividly with the surrounding exposed paper surface.
Aditi Singh's painting process reflects the influence of Vedic hymns and Eastern philosophical thinking around time, attention, observation, and discipline. She states: 'Painting is a field of deep attention, and out of that attention emerges an understanding of what is there. I paint to experience something more expansive than where I speak from.'
Singh's large-scale artworks on parchment and Kozo paper such as Violet is the dark (2020), Night Sky with Feathers and a Moon (2020), and Only the Horizontal Infinite (2020) engage charcoal and ink in considered layering and reworking, bearing traces of a cumulative, ritualistic process. Small, rhythmic, repetitive marks converge to form blurred, textural masses of varying densities, encouraging a zooming in and out of observation. The artist attempts not to recreate a sense of time as experienced in nature, but explores how she can consciously engage materially with the compression, expansion, and fragmentation of time.
Singh has exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions including Somethings Are Always Burning, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (2021); so much the less complete, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York (2018); All that is left behind, Thomas Erben Gallery (2016); Let it be a heaven of blackbed roses, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (2010); and Stand still like a humming bird, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (2008).
Selected group exhibitions include On | Site, a collaborative off-site project in New Delhi through Chemould Prescott Road (2021), Mumbai; Modus Operandi II: In-Situ: An Artist Studio, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumabi (2019); Modus Operandi, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (2018); and A Perspective on Contemporary Art: Emotional Drawing, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (2008).
Singh has also participated in group exhibitions at DECK, Singapore; SOMA Drawing Centre, Seoul; and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney.
Misong Kim | Ocula | 2021
