Arpita Singh, painter who set auction record, dies at 89

Indian painter Arpita Singh died in New Delhi on 9 November 2026, at 89. Her husband, painter Paramjit Singh, confirmed her death to the Tribune, ARTnews said, citing the newspaper.

Her mural Wish Dream sold at Saffronart for Rs 9.56 crore in 2010, setting what was then an auction record for an Indian woman artist, The Times of India said. The painting has 16 panels.

From abstraction to figures

Over a six-decade career, Singh repeatedly changed how she worked. Her best-known figurative paintings draw on Hindu lore and Indian history, placing gods and ordinary people in landscapes that resemble maps.

Singh moved to New Delhi in 1946. The following year, the violence of Partition, which divided British India into India and Pakistan, shaped her early memories; she recalled seeing a man killed below her balcony. She graduated from Delhi Polytechnic’s art school in 1959, having encountered books on European modernism during her studies. She recalled gravitating toward Der Blaue Reiter, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Marc Chagall.

Uncertain about her early figurative work, Singh turned in the 1970s and 1980s to largely colorless abstract images made from dots and dashes. By the end of the 1980s, she had returned to painting figures.

In Devi Pistol Wali (1990), a shrouded woman with many arms points a gun at a man holding a sword. The Times of India identifies the figure as Durga. The painting has often been read as a response to violence against women in India, but Singh discouraged that interpretation. She said current events entered her paintings as light becomes color and a breeze becomes movement. She also resisted calling her work dreamlike, saying she controlled what went into it. Writing in Artforum, Meara Sharma described the paintings as real worlds of Singh’s own creation rather than dreamworlds.