Gallery Espace Brings International Artist Rina Banerjee to town with a solo exhibition titled ‘Allure’

New Delhi: Gallery Espace presents ‘Allure’; a solo exhibition of recent works (acrylic and ink on paper) by internationally renowned Brooklyn-based artist, Rina Banerjee from December 19, 2008 to January 13, 2009 at Gallery Espace, (Level 02), 16, Community Centre, New Friends Colony.

Says Ms. Renu Modi, Director, Gallery Espace: “Rina Banerjee’s work mixes Asian and western materials. Powdered spices, glittering sari cloth create a hybrid version of exoticism, one that works not just west to east but in both directions, and has a creepy, spoiled, mutant beauty. Her characteristically mischievous process of transformation of objects and their cultural locations playfully unhinges them from their unique specificity.”

"…...Rina Banerjee’s work is all about excess and colour and has south Indian vibes, it is also about east-west relations, tourism, exoticism and stereotypes..." that’s how New York Times describes the work of the Kolkata-born artist.

Says Rina Banerjee: “There is a long history to the mythologisation of the female figure, body and its vanishing sexuality towards an ungendered old age. Like a dizzying pendulum, we as people find something to mistrust, find fault with, blame, fear and negate that is also the very core of our most tender curiosity. Unlike greed or lust this space delivers, rescues, enlightens and surrenders us to an eternal blissful sanity. Sigmund Freud’s points of referring to the other sex as ‘container’ refers to the womb, this jeweled box, gendered in a trap not yet known.”

Born in 1963, Kolkata, India, Rina Banerjee has lived in the United States since she was a child. Educated at Yale University, School of Art, she currently lives and works in New York City. Her work explores specific colonial moments that reinvent place and identity as complex diasporic experiences. The way she assembles colonial objects, souvenirs and decorative crafts makes the experience of seeing artefacts and history in art making as an entangled process. Their aesthetic and cultural beginnings suggest in particular how the many regional culture affects continue to stain our perceptions of home, the exotic, the foreign and domestic worlds.

Beginning her profession as a material science engineer, one can sense in her artworks the material awareness often mixing the organic and plastic to invite a blurring of our recognition. Says Rina Banerjee, “My sculptures, installations, videos and drawings are inspired by a wide range of mundane objects and home crafts. The metaphors jewel, gold, glitter and net proliferates the visual vocabulary of my work.”

The result one can see offers a new way of seeing culture. Simultaneously preoccupations with the savage, insects, foreign, alien are familiar categories of identity that is also generated in the work. There is also the forbidden prolonged looking that confuses, beguiles and mixes beauty with the grotesque. Another aspect in her artworks are the use of narrative text which decorate the work with meaning and intention that further plays with the idea of artist voice and the aesthetic of exotic beauty, physical illusion of ornamental object as a sign. Her imagery stems from multiple cultural histories, both eastern and western art.

From her sensational debut at the Whitney Biennial 2000, Rina Banerjee has been very successful at her last exhibitions in Tsumari-Echigo’s 3rd Triennial in Japan and PS 1/MoMA. Her works have been in focus in the

Brent Sikema, Bose Pacia Modern Gallery, Debs and Co. Gallery, Bronx Museum, New Museum, and Queens Museum acquiring favorable reviews in Art News, Art Forum and Art in America. Presently her works can be viewed at Mass Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams in an exhibition "Yankee Remix". She has also exhibited abroad in Madrid, Durban, Africa and India.

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