WHEN THERE IS NO HINT OF AN EXPRESSIVE SEXUALITY – Arpana Caur: painting composition and visual tension

ARPANA CAUR 1/3 – Born in New Delhi, Arpana Caur spent her college years studying literature. As an contemporary Indian artist, she is largely self-taught, but observing her work you can feel that she continue the line begun by Amrita Sher-Gil. She started looking at the architecture in Pahari miniatures that led to her creating strange, linear tensions vis-à-vis the roundness of the figure.

ARPANA CAUR 2/3 – To begin with, her major preoccupation was her identity, both as a woman and as an artist. It is feminine and feminist in its perspective, with portraits of women placed in a contemporary urban context. She has exhibited since 1974 across the globe, with her solo shows in Delhi and Mumbai, Calcutta, Bangalore and Chennai, London, Glasgow and Berlin, New York, Stockholm and Copenhagen.

ARPANA CAUR 3/3 – Today her paintings support several projects for the underprivileged, including free vocational training in the Academy of Fine Arts and Literature, and supports a leprosy home in Ghaziabad, and ration projects for poor and old widows. Gradually, she felt she was restricting herself to themes rather than aesthetic preoccupations like composition and the visual tension within the painting. The erotic is downplayed in favor of the sturdy. You can see more on Meeting Benches, looking for: http://meetingbenches.com/2016/05/arpana-caur-indian-painter-when-the-perspective-become-feminine-and-feminist/