Event Title:

Organization:

  Visual Arts

  San Francisco

Start Date:

  6/8/2013

End Date:

  6/8/2013

Start Time:

  4:00 PM

End Time:

  6:00 PM

Event Info: 

  28 May - 13 July, Opening: Saturday, 8 June, 4-6pm

For her first project at Hosfelt Gallery, Rina Banerjee brings together a monumental, pink, Mughal-inspired sculpture and a group of her delicate and sensuous paintings on paper, in a paean to the potential of 21st century love.

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. 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 sculpture at the center of this installation takes its form from the Taj Mahal. Often cited as the most beautiful building in the world, it is the epitome of Mughal architecture - an amalgam of elements of Islamic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Indian styles - a design hybrid born of two thousand years of incursions, migrations, invasions and colonization. The Taj Mahal is also the world's most famous monument to romantic love - a lavish and unabashed public display of affection.

Banerjee's palace is rendered in pink plastic rather than white marble. It's decorated with fake pearls, cowrie shells and florist's moss rather than jade, turquoise and carnelian. A marriage of high and low culture, it is a mutation - emblematic of a world constantly in flux - of societies continuously reshaping their belief systems. It is a refusal to make judgments based on traditional notions of beauty, importance, worth or usefulness. For the first time in history, Banerjee argues, humanity has an opportunity to consider love outside concerns of reproduction or patrimony and beyond issues of race, gender or religion. This exhibition is a tender tribute to the emergence of love for the sake of love.

http://hosfeltgallery.com

Location:

  Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco

Room:

Address:

  260 Utah Street

Phone:

  415-495-5454

City:

  San Francisco

State/Province:

  CA