RINA BANERJEE

Her 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.