Rina Banerjee: Blemish
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.
BLEMISH
The blemish is subject to rejection. It is located as an unnatural, unsightly mark on the more expansive surface which has been injured. A wound or dent out of an accidental hit, a scar, a discoloration. This unwanted formation that makes one imperfect and feel stained by its emergence is a crisis. The established view is that normative responses to a blemish can range from disgust to agitation. This blemish is always a detail, one that can perform volumes as it reidentifies, reclaims and transforms the normal whole. This blemish commands, has reach, and opens the voice to difference.
Cultural division in the American landscape continues to grow, morph; devolving and evolving, disguised at times, to create a preoccupation with insecurities, over-vigilance—that strategy that smokes out difference when the enemy resembles you and you can no longer trust your tools of recognition. The urban location is routinely considered a place/point of migration, a well, a deposit for the unwanted or unloved in the imagination. The homeless, teenage runaways, artists, musicians, intellectuals, criminals, gangs, illegal immigrants, foreigners, African Americans, Mexicans; this garden of unbelonging Americans clatters and claims to tow a mixture thrust into exile: a resting spot, a safe waiting room to retell the story, to redefine the Human Family which begins and ends with just being human.
The figurative drawings and paintings embrace the body as a transformative permeable vessel, fluid and unreconcilable with normative impulses that could make it uncomfortably captive.
—Rina Banerjee
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Rina BanerjeeCaptured as hostage, a threat from sky, hide or you may die, sit in reverse position, fold back your legs, pinned in the mother shepard's carpet, with for tides that stay up high why why my mother's wild nature opens and cleanse, cleared me a place to st, 2019acrylic, gold leaf, silver leaf, faux fur and false eyelashes on paper30 x 22 in
76.2 x 55.9 cm -
Rina BanerjeeRelocation? is this a dislocation? An undercover twisted formation? migration trapped in geography and distress of growing garbage of plastic bags in the sea, she in sea to shining sea, America reminded her, her of her or he as she not to be confused by a, 2019acrylic and copper leaf on paper30 x 22 in
76.2 x 55.9 cm -
Rina BanerjeeHuman stain, release us from fearing the fears of our others who are in pain. Stay awhile to listen to this unwanted stain, hiding, heard or frozen stares be gone as we come together, our girls, children to grow away from silence and her sister - shame. , 2019acrylic and collage on paper30 x 22 in
76.2 x 55.9 cm -
Rina BanerjeePass me the mustard, hide your self like a blemish unseen. Where ever you may be, quiet yourself, play confused, pretend, be absent because the scent of females like mustard sting. Pass me not the mustard but Durga turmeric, saffron and sun. , 2019acrylic and false eyelashes on paper22 x 30 in
55.9 x 76.2 cm -
Rina BanerjeeHair can stare, be there stare back, if you have unsightly ends or attachments make good friends, curls no longer just relaxing, perfecting and re asking who has more fun if the fun is not for men solely., 2019acrylic on paper30 x 22 in
76.2 x 55.9 cm -
Rina BanerjeeLifting her, Zarina up and away from Snow Monkey, stay and play bring our friendships not to be blamed for histories that wishfully erase old age, Pale Snow Monkey can reclaim as messenger god be brave and stay. , 2019acrylic on paper30 x 22 in
76.2 x 55.9 cm -
Rina BanerjeeShe had guts! She got lost and she fought a lot, hung her inside cords, colon, stomached all that she could. She stood on a beach with one arm a hook and the other held fish, held out her actions, feared no God as nature, her mother was on her heel's side, 2019acrylic, collage and copper leaf on paper30 x 22 in
76.2 x 55.9 cm -
Rina BanerjeeStanding trial by man and the family of Man denied she wore the hardest but turtle shells on her mossy back heels dug on hers alone a golden island with foaming waters at edge, exhausted by humanity his fears of others, mothers, girls and boys that could , 2019acrylic and gold leaf on wood panel20 x 16 in
50.8 x 40.6 cm -
Rina BanerjeeNative girls, indigenous heart, In DNA, is that you in my dream between desert and tropics walking in line in perfect pollination and alienation conceived me foreign by day and first born by night., 2019acrylic, aluminum leaf and gold leaf on wood panel20 x 16 in
50.8 x 40.6 cm -
Rina BanerjeeDurga you have lived too long in New York City, inserted, vulgar habitat with eyebrows perfectly threaded, nails cut to corners sharp you strike your demons followed by our mother earth bulbous and acrobatic displaced earths movements thrown by coin or we, 2019acrylic and gold leaf on wood panel20 x 16 in
50.8 x 40.6 cm -
Rina BanerjeeFortune Teller, tell me my fortune is wrong, my marrow is strong, dreams are crowns that coil like eels, locks of hair too quick to tangle, make my bangles loose, bring me back to me at home where I can be without the sting of your rage-like noose, 2018acrylic, marbled paper collage and gold leaf on paper30 x 22 in
76.2 x 55.9 cm -
Rina BanerjeeA myriad of voices from beaten ground and buried folks, headless cries break even and odd broken sky to make sea to float like crackers baked by empires storm to make us hovel beneath, in whispers this blemish is wound, countable, not incorrect or surmoun, 2019acrylic and collage on handmade paper
installation dimensions variable63 x 70 in
160 x 177.8 cm -
Rina BanerjeeAll heart and wonder the future came to her like thunderous lava, she leaped while it seeped into places hostile and thence explosions placed her away from him, his anger waked her as survivor, 2017acrylic, marbled paper collage and gold leaf on paper22 x 30 in
55.9 x 76.2 cm -
Rina BanerjeeStolen lives, beetle black drops littered darkness, hid her and twice that hid the mischief of men. Blackened tears of mineral, seeds of complicated race hiding from hiding watered hate. So she spread spread sunny dress, cover me open with pinker clouds a, 2019acrylic and silver leaf on paper30 x 22 in
76.2 x 55.9 cm
