Chitra Ganesh
The drawings, installations, text-based work, and collaborations of Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh are inspired by buried narratives and marginal figures typically excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art. She is widely recognized for her experimental use of comic and large-scale narrative forms to communicate submerged histories and alternate articulations of femininity to a broader public.
Ganesh draws from a broad range of material, including the iconography of Hindu, Greek and Buddhist mythology, 19th century European portraiture and fairytales, archival photography, and song lyrics, as well as contemporary visual culture such as Bollywood posters, anime, and comic books. Using a process of automatic writing, she probes this visual and textual material to connect seemingly disparate narratives, and reveal uncanny moments of absence and buried desire. Fragments of poetic language cohere with her visual iconography to produce nonlinear narratives of “unforseen desire and untimely loss, ” offering audiences untold tales from both collectively imagined pasts and distant futures.
Ganesh’s works have been widely exhibited across the United States including at the Queens Museum, Asia Society, New York, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California, and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, with solo presentations at PS1/MOMA, …
The drawings, installations, text-based work, and collaborations of Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh are inspired by buried narratives and marginal figures typically excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art. She is widely recognized for her experimental use of comic and large-scale narrative forms to communicate submerged histories and alternate articulations of femininity to a broader public.
Ganesh draws from a broad range of material, including the iconography of Hindu, Greek and Buddhist mythology, 19th century European portraiture and fairytales, archival photography, and song lyrics, as well as contemporary visual culture such as Bollywood posters, anime, and comic books. Using a process of automatic writing, she probes this visual and textual material to connect seemingly disparate narratives, and reveal uncanny moments of absence and buried desire. Fragments of poetic language cohere with her visual iconography to produce nonlinear narratives of “unforseen desire and untimely loss, ” offering audiences untold tales from both collectively imagined pasts and distant futures.
Ganesh’s works have been widely exhibited across the United States including at the Queens Museum, Asia Society, New York, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California, and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, with solo presentations at PS1/MOMA, New York, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, and Goteborgs Konsthalle, Sweden. Ganesh is the recipient numerous awards and fellowships including the Art Matters Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation for Painting and Sculpture, and a 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in the Creative Arts.
Courtesy of the Artist
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
Gwangju Contemporary Art Centre
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York
San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA
Whitney Museum of Art, New York
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD