Arpita Singh (b. 1937 Bengal, India), Women in Black, 2017, Watercolor on paper, 11 5/8 in. x 16 in. (29.5 cm x 40.6 cm), Gift of Radhika Chopra (Class of 1991) 2021.8

A watercolor by Arpita Singh, one of India's most prominent contemporary artists, was recently gifted to the Davis Museum. Born in 1937 in West Bengal, Singh moved with her family to New Delhi in 1946, where she has lived and worked ever since. Singh attended the School of Art, Delhi Polytechnic, and worked as a textile designer at the Weaver's Service Center after graduation. Drawing on the stylistic devices of traditional Kantha embroidery from Bengal, her paintings reflect her work in the textile industry. Her first exhibition was held at Kunika Chemould Gallery, New Delhi, in 1972. Since then, her works have been exhibited at prominent institutions globally, including the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.

Like much of Singh's work, Women in Black centers the inner lives of women. The image is composed of seven seated women dressed in black, floating ungrounded in space. Most of the women have an arm extended, and some hold a hand raised to their face as if they are weeping. Here, Singh uses washes of gray in the background to create a flattened space, defined by a grid of numbers and dots on the left side. Despite the implied logic and order of the grid, the women's curled postures and sad facial expressions fill the work with emotion, and patches of blue cover the composition, reminiscent of tears. Art critic Holland Cotter has described Singh's work as a dreamlike atmosphere that presents a scene of "figures of women…in domestic situations fraught with undefined conflict". In Women in Black she empathetically depicts the sorrow of these nameless women.