Hosfelt Gallery presents a solo installation of new sculptures, paintings, and works on paper by Rina Banerjee for its inaugural participation in the India Art Fair.
Banerjee, who was born in Kolkata, India and lives in New York, works with a cosmopolitan eclecticism that reflects both her transnational background and her sophisticated understanding of the narrative power of objects. Using trinkets made for the tourist trade, horn, bone, feathers, shells, textiles, glass bottles and antiques, she assembles rapturous sculptures that are mystifyingly shamanistic, yet overflowing with connotation. Her works are hyper-ornamented and lushly seductive. Conjoining rarities with cheap, mass-produced bric-a-brac, she appropriates extravagantly while rejecting hierarchies of material, culture and value.
The Body, that which is everything, that could then be something, an object, could also be nothing.
There was no thirst for her, no essential belonging. She was a body without organs, of no mind, without brain, of no heart, no liver, no need of her own, a vessel dried of all being. When tipped to she could be poured on command, would lean her back to a timeless emptying. She was a storage for new birth, even a girl-less birth upon command, a shelf to lay humanity’s DNA, a thing before currency. The Uncatchable drink before true thirst. When will she rise upright.
