Arpana Caur

A self-taught artist, Arpana Caur was born in Delhi in 1954. A student of literature, she graduated in 1975. In 1979, she received a scholarship to study at St. Martin's School of Art, London, but returned to Delhi without having completed the course.

A landmark in Arpana's career as an artist was the execution of a huge work commissioned by the Hiroshima Museum in 1995 to mark the 50th anniversary of the nuclear holocaust. The artist also has another first to her credit. She is the first contemporary Indian painter who co-signed with a tribal artist to produce collaborative works that show a unique blend of tribal and contemporary motifs. Arpana uses a few distinctive metaphors in her works, namely the scissors and the extended hand. The former is used as a metaphor of time, capable of snipping Man's fate (his thread of life) which is in a state of perpetual suspension. The latter is used to symbolize the strength and power of women ...

Sher-Gil's painting was a portrait of a woman, obviously based on an Ajanta cave painting - moody, mysterious, and curiously implosive. Arpana Caur's work was much more gestural. Against an infinity of stormy, indigo sky and a white speckled red foreground the figure of an aged women, ghostly in her white shroud-like sari, faces a saucer-eyed child. Old age and youth mirror each other; the viewer was confronted by an allegory on the theme of immutability and mortality that was quite terrifying.

The gift of the two paintings coincided with the opening of an exhibition on Sikh culture, curated by Bradford Art Galleries and Museums, called Warm and Rich and Fearless. Since both Sher-Gil and Arpana are of Sikh descent, it seemed appropriate to incorporate their works in the exhibition. The display also included miniature paintings of the Sikh school, woodcuts, rich damascene and gem-studded armour and weaponry, jewellery and phulkaris and baghs, embroidered textiles from the Punjab, in which Sikh women, in particular, excel.

All these objects were intricately worked, the gold koftgiri inlay on the steel armour, the bejewelled daggers, the laboriously embroidered phulkaris, the hierarchical troubled world presented within the miniatures and even Sher-Gil's sombre earth-coloured palettes showing a dreaming girl. In this exhibition, one was surrounded by minute detail. But dominating all this were the spacious, horizons of Arpana's painting, a perfect contrapuntal device. Although allegorical, it was also modern and it was confident. And in its modernism and confidence, it seemed to breathe a different glowing life into the surrounding works. It not only brought their richness even more to the fore, but it also further particularised them.

And strangely enough there were all manners of echoes, hints and allusions between this extraordinary painting and the other exhibits. The horizon seemed a non-formulaic re-working of the horizons contained in the miniatures, the flower-speckled foreground reminded the audience of embroidered phulkaris.