ANJUM SINGH

ANJUM SINGH was born in Delhi.Anjums training has been in painting from Shanti Niketan & New Delhi & later painting & print making from Concoran School of art Washington D.C. It was in America that she became more open to experimentation & started working in different mediums. Her kitchen is stacked with mineral water bottle crates each bottle promising total protection from germs and disease, as it wraps the fluid in plastic. Anjum uses both water and the packaging (the shield between an inner pure substance and the germ ridden outer world) as metaphors for a security blanket.

Through these everyday symbols from metropolitan India, Anjum dwells upon the idea of purity versus pollution. In her paintings she uses mundane ordinary images that one is confronted with in our everyday life, a work titled as ‘Bumper to Bumper’ reminds us of nothing but a traffic jam , ‘Wormy Water” points out to the water pollution that still exists. Another work is titled as ‘Spit’ which the artist feels is very much Delhi, and to which we all agree. Lately the artist has been making constructions (cola bloom, petals of plastic) using objects which were used as images in her canvases before. They say that artists have method in their madness. The opposite is true of Anjum. While her state of mind does ‘SPILL’ over, she is a disciplined painter who paints each day till she decides that the work has acquired a finality. When Anjum returned to India, she gradually simplified the texture she used in her works, just using flat structures. She has had several solo shows in India and also had a solo show in New York in 1999. She received the Charles Wallace Fellowship from The British Council to work at Gasworks at London in 2002-03 and has also been a part of Khoj. She works and lives in Delhi.

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