Monsters, Demigods, and the World in Between
Rina Banerjee’s (b. 1963, Kolkata, India) world is a chimerical terrestrial paradise. A lingering peculiarity lies at the heart of her art which is a combination of painting, collage, small, and large-scale sculptures. Monsters, Demigods, and the World in Between is but a small sample from Banerjee’s complete oeuvre that showcases the multidimensionality of her visual language. The selection of six paintings and two small sculptures invites us to her private world where the grotesque is beautiful, and propriety, if observed at all, is distorted to reveal inconvenient truths that take the form of unending details.
Although sculpture is the mainstay of Banerjee’s practice, the exhibition focuses on her drawings and paintings that take inspiration from the technical aspects of her three-dimensional constructions. “The piercing pink shade”, for instance, “that she has long used as an atmospheric hue in her structures”[1] enhance the narrative and pictorial matter of her paintings. Its larger elements—cloud-like forms, multiarmed goddesses, and mythological beasts suspended in the air— reference past traditions in Chinese, Tibetan, and Mughal miniature art. And the show isn’t complete without Banerjee’s wordy titles that challenge every grammatical rule of the English language.
The intentional mixing of words, expressions, materials, and even body parts can be seen as Rina Banerjee’s conversation with herself—the many versions of herself. The first ten years of her life were spent in migration between Kolkata, London, Philadelphia, and New York. Cultural dislocation in combination with Banerjee’s undergraduate studies in polymer engineering inform her sensitivity toward uncommon sculpture-making and densely layered paintings. The technicalities of her biography, however, are not enough to define her position as an artist or characterize her practice. They are just factors in her conception of time and space; and this exhibition is an effort to understand her unconventional whimsy.
[1] Martin, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Ota Fine Arts, Éditions Dilect, 9
Image source: artsy.net