My heart is another ‘gadet’
Artist Anjum Singh passes away leaving behind her painted engagements with the struggle of the body and its ‘mechanisms’
Her paintings often spoke of the dynamic, unpredictable internal world of the body, where the organic and the mechanical come together seamlessly, in a strange continuity that speaks specifically of the human condition. Artist Anjum Singh passed away on the 17th of November 2020, as her body gave in to it’s battle with cancer that she was diagnosed with in 2014. Anjum was the daughter of artist couple Arpita and Paramjit Singh.
“Our beloved daughter Anjum Singh passed away on the 17th of November. There are no words to describe our loss. Our pain is shared by her family and friends,” wrote the artists. Arpita and Paramjit Singh.
She was known for her strong, poetic and beautiful painting that brought one’s attention to her struggle and her layered relationship with her condition. She recently wrote: “Often at night, I comfort my body. With gentle words and caresses, I make it smile and put it to sleep. There are two of us in the room now, me and my body,” said Delhi-based artist, whose show of drawings, watercolours and oils titled “I am still here” announced a relationship which is often unpredictable but always finds its centre. The exhibition opened on September 9 and ran till January 4, 2020 at
Talwar Gallery, New Delhi.
It deepened Singh’s investigation into the intricate systems, the currents, flows, exchanges—as well as points of breakdown—that occur continuously within this internal realm. Moving deftly between visual modes, from fully textured canvases to the ethereal, delicate forms that seem to float on paper, Singh attests to the flexibility needed to bring this rich internal life to light. Indeed, I am still here attending not only to the body as lived experience, as felt from the inside, but also to the way this experience is translated into comprehensible form—the way the body is narrated, pictured, made sense of. Calling attention to the power of art, like science or medicine, to plumb the inner workings of the body, I am still here, creating its own vocabulary, honest and revealing, the often astonishing world that lies beneath the skin.
The artist had studied the human figure as a student in Santiniketan and Delhi, but she then made its complex internal universe, the object of her gaze. In 2002 she had an exhibition of her work at Talwar Gallery, in Manhattan, New York, America. Viewed outside her country of origin it was observed that even then, that her paintings reflected how the world immediately around her struggled with a sense of compromised purity, with the idea of ‘adulteration’, of the traditional with the Modern of the past with the present of the organic with the mechanised. This may account for her images of entangling systems — honeycombs, tubes — that are half-organic, half-mechanised…entangled in an engaging mesh.
“Like many young artists, Ms. Singh thrives on precisely this blend, and she is forging from it an art of visual panache and enigmatic wit,” observed Holland Cotter, art writer for the New York Times.
To the point where Singh is known to have said, “The heart continues to beat and remains deeply in love with life. But on the other hand, it is just another gadget.” She brought a sense of deep irony to her work and her life and was known to be still and contemplative as a person.
“Her work was contemplative, a silence that pervades. She herself was a very silent, quiet person and that reflected in her work. Her work speaks to us in a quietened frenzy,” observes art historian and critic Nanak Ganguli.
The year 2020 has been a terrible year of losses and the art world is in mourning over the loss of another of its sensitive souls whose artworks will live on despite her sad and sudden demise.
“Today we mourn the loss of a wonderful artist and dear friend of the gallery, Anjum Singh. Her passion for her work, her family and her friends was immense and admirable. She was a warrior who’s fierce love for work and life will be remembered by all of us. We feel blessed to have been a part of her life. She will be missed but will also live on in our hearts forever.” Roshini Vadehra.
Text by Georgina Maddox
Image Courtesy: Talwar Art Gallery and Nanak Ganguli
Find out more about the Artists and Gallery:
https://www.saffronart.com/artists/anjum-singh
https://www.instagram.com/roshinivadehra/?hl=en
https://talwargallery.com/anjumpaintings-pr/
https://talwargallery.com/paramjitrecent-pr/
