Artist: Arpana Caur
Title: Between Dualities – Day and Night
Size: 3 X 4 feet
Year: 2018
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Profile
Arpana Caur is a painter whose oeuvre has been primarily marked by her sensitivity to issue around, women, environment, the underprivileged subaltern, like the Widows of Vrindavan and the Sikh Massacre of the 1980s. She is primarily a self-taught artist. Her to surviving the vicissitudes of life. The plastic forms that people her canvas implore the viewer to strive for a gentler more tolerant world. She often pays tribute to the Lord Buddha, Guru Nanak and uses the narrative of Soni and Mahiwal to talk of religious tolerance. It has been observed that there is no hint of an expressive sexuality in Caur’s work. Recurring motifs in her works are the body as garment and the scissors as a separator of night and day. She also uses the ruler and geometrical instruments as measurements of time, a reminder of our own mortality, Images of women weaving garments out of water against a burning skyline is especially poetic and metaphoric in Caur’s work. It brings to it a nuanced narrative of woman of witness of socio- political strife.