Born in Calcutta in 1963, but raised in London and New York, Rina Banerjee’s sculptural assemblages of textiles, fashion items, colonial objects, furnishings, taxidermy and organic materials, sourced from New York junk shops are configured into new and exotic arrangements. Her works have included such unusual materials as taxidermied alligators, wooden cots, fish bones, ostrich eggs, feathers and antique furnishings, forming a visual language steeped in mythology and fairy tales. Banerjee confronts Orientalism and the legacy of British colonial rule in paintings and sculptures, lacing her semi-erotic pictures with pseudo-spiritual imagery that could allude to Hindu mysticism.
Read MoreHer titles are frustratingly childlike – long, garbled and misspelled sentences that seem to veer off on tangents that undermine the fairytales she alludes to. One reads: Goldielocks, when and where can our desire to reach be? In the larger world she can roam and not be still … then does temptations turn to know and curiosity can rock – leaving her cut, cut free.This use of folklore implies that Banerjee is attempting to find connections between cultures – her artworks representing a collective cultural confusion brought about by immigration and exile. Yet ultimately her paintings and installations are seductive constructions. The gold leaf, the watery dribbles of hot pink, the hybrid forms – all are as infatuating as sirens, offering the lure and terror of the exotic.
Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Biennale (2000), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2003), Brooklyn Museum of Art (2004), Fatal Love: South American Art Now at The Queens Museums of Art, New York (2005), Greater New York Show at PS1/MOMA, New York (2005), a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2008), Boghossian Foundation, Brussels (2010). In 2011, she held a solo show Rina Barnerjee: Chimeras of India and The West at Musée Guimet, Paris.
