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Lot Essay
Rina Banerjee's conjured cosmos force fabric and fabricated disparate objects to coexist together in a world of fairytales and fantasy. Her fetishistic deference to such diverse materials enchants the eye, inviting us to weave through her compositions. The inclusion of the textile silver wings on the angelic insect exemplifies this attention to fabric and texture, "[...] Banerjee applies the exquisite detail of Indian miniature painting to fantastical scenes that blend mythological imagery from a range of cultural and historical sources." ('50 Next Most Collectible Artists', Art + Auction, June 2012, unpaginated)
This fantastical map of the world is only partially recognizable. With little fealty to conventional cartographies, borders are removed, each nation merges with the other as if a single exotic mythical mass. By inverting the colonial paradigm, Banerjee confronts the legacy of British colonial rule, whereby empires grow exponentially as its denizens accumulate and consume all that they occupy and threads of commerce and consumption spread out across the world in an entangled exchange. Banerjee translates this into this quixotic universe with hybrid anthropomorphic creatures and fairies which enrapture the inverted empire beneath them, subsuming and uniting all nations and species into her fantasy.
Banerjee has been noted as one of the 50 next most collectible artists in Art + Auction alongside Bharti Kher. She participated in the recent exhibition India: Art Now at the Arken Museum, Copenhagen (August 2012 -- January 2013) and she is the only other Indian artist, alongside Dayanita Singh, to show at the Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art, Queensland (December 2012 -- April 2013).
This fantastical map of the world is only partially recognizable. With little fealty to conventional cartographies, borders are removed, each nation merges with the other as if a single exotic mythical mass. By inverting the colonial paradigm, Banerjee confronts the legacy of British colonial rule, whereby empires grow exponentially as its denizens accumulate and consume all that they occupy and threads of commerce and consumption spread out across the world in an entangled exchange. Banerjee translates this into this quixotic universe with hybrid anthropomorphic creatures and fairies which enrapture the inverted empire beneath them, subsuming and uniting all nations and species into her fantasy.
Banerjee has been noted as one of the 50 next most collectible artists in Art + Auction alongside Bharti Kher. She participated in the recent exhibition India: Art Now at the Arken Museum, Copenhagen (August 2012 -- January 2013) and she is the only other Indian artist, alongside Dayanita Singh, to show at the Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art, Queensland (December 2012 -- April 2013).