Hosfelt Gallery presents a solo show of new mixed media paintings on paper by Kolkata-born, New York-based Rina Banerjee, as an ancillary exhibition to her touring mid-career survey, currently on view at the San Jose Museum of Art.
Banerjee’s sensuous and otherworldly paintings reflect both her transnational background and her mastery of materials and image-making to examine and describe the complexities of 21st century globalism.
Delicately rendered in inks, metallic leaf and collaged elements, female figures float in worlds both fluid and ambiguous. They’re dislocated, detached and in states of transformation — sometimes shifting between human and bird or beast. She spins narratives relating to colonialism, environmentalism, immigration and identity, poetically tackling the big issues from the perspective of a woman of color.
Freedom is the most expensive commodity; nature the most dangerous beauty. My work examines both. My art depicts a delicate world that is also aggressive, tangled, manipulated, fragile, and very, very dense.– Rina Banerjee
Rina Banerjee (b. 1963, Kolkata, India) received a BS in Polymer Engineering and worked as a research chemist before completing her MFA at Yale in 1995. Her ambitious mid-career survey exhibition, Make Me a Summary of the World — which presents twenty years of Banerjee’s large-scale installations, sculptures and paintings — is on view at the San Jose Museum of Art through October 6. It opened at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2018 and will travel to the Fowler Museum at UCLA (December 8, 2019 – May 31, 2020), Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (July 24 – October 25, 2020) and Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC (February 18 – July 11, 2021).
Other recent solo museum exhibitions include the Smithsonian Museum’s Sackler Galleries (Washington, DC) and the Musée Guimet (Paris). Her work gained international attention at the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and has since been included in the 2005 and 2015 Greater New York Shows at PS1/MOMA, the 2013 and 2017 Venice Biennales, the 2015 Asian Art Biennial at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taichung), the 2016 Busan Biennial (South Korea), the 2017 Prospect 4 in New Orleans, and the 2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale (Kochi, India). Her work is in numerous international public and prestigious private collections.
