On the occasion of the major solo exhibition devoted by the Musée Guimet to the artist Rina Banerjee, "Chimères de l'Inde et de l'Occident", and while the Centre Pompidou is inaugurating its exhibition "Paris-Delhi-Bombay", Nathalie Obadia is pleased to accompany these two events by showing recent works by this American artist, born in Calcutta in 1963, in Space II of her Paris gallery. A large installation as well as several new drawings by the artist will be presented from Sunday, May 22 to July 13.
Born in India, Rina Banerjee was raised in London and Queens. After studying engineering and fine arts at Yale University, she now lives in Manhattan. The work of this artist shows the ambiguity of her double belonging to the Western and Eastern worlds, the crossbreeding of an aesthetic that sometimes refers to an ancestral practice, sometimes borrows from a "pop" imagery, heir to the American and European avant-gardes. This lively and playful work allows, in the background, the emergence of a political statement, of an often acerbic social criticism that can be understood as a romantic charge against the dilution of Indian culture in the face of globalization.
In the monumental sculpture Preternatural passage came from wet whiteness and mercantile madness, which mixes organic elements, traditional jewels, shoe trees found in a New York flea market and brightly colored Indian saris, we find all the hybridity of a work that stages a strange female figure with a mythological aspect and whose metamorphosis asserts itself as a principle of composition. A porcelain doll's head reminiscent of the toys of English women of the colonial era, topped with an oriental turban, sinks into a crinoline worthy of the American Scarlett O'Hara, making the work a metaphor for a globalization stricken by schizophrenia. The threatening-looking animal horns and the multiplication of feet that complete the sculpture reinforce this feeling of face-to-face contact with a hybrid and elusive being, half insect, half child, who, in trying to grasp the infinite possibilities, inevitably turns in on itself.