Nature Morte is proud to host an exhibition of new color photographs by the prominent photographer Dayanita Singh. Premiered at the Frith Street Gallery in London in November 2008, the body of work is entitled "Dream Villa." The color photographs explore how the night transforms what seems ordinary by day into something mysterious and magical. These lush images are saturated with intense color and present a landscape which exists as much in the artist's imagination as in the real world. Ms. Singh travels to many different cities to find her images, never knowing where Dream Villa or its inhabitants will present themselves. The empty streets, the arrangements of neon lights and the silent façades have an unsettling and at times sinister atmosphere, this is a place where nothing is quite as it seems – it comes into being at night, when all is lit by artificial light and the moon is just ornamentation.

Steidl, the renowned German publisher of photography books, will publish the book of "Dream Villa."

Born in New Delhi in 1961, Dayanita Singh studied Visual Communication at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and later Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. She has held solo exhibitions of her work at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum in Boston, Recontres Arles in France, the Ikon Gallery of Birmingham, Gallery Nature Morte in New Delhi, Frith Street Gallery in London, Studio Guenzani in Milan, Gallery Chemould and Gallery Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Bombay. In addition, her works have been included in group exhibitions in such prestigious venues as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, London's Tate Modern, the Asia Society in New York, the Kunsthalle in Vienna and the Asian Arts Museum of San Francisco.

In 2008, Ms. Singh was awarded a Robert Gardner Fellowship from the Harvard University Art Museums and also received the prestigious Prince Claus Award "for the outstanding quality of her images, for providing a complex and well-articulated view of contemporary India, and for introducing a new aesthetic into Indian photography".

A major retrospective of Ms. Singh's photographs will open at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid on January 19th, 2010, accompanied by a book to be co-published with Penguin India