Want to see new art in the city? Check out Joan Brown, Giorgio de Chirico and the making of Art-Rite magazine in Chelsea, and Rina Banerjee on the Lower East Side
Rina Banerjee
Rina Banerjee’s show at Perrotin is well timed: Her style of world-building with everyday materials is having a moment. Current museum exhibitions devoted to Wangechi Mutu, Daniel Lind-Ramos and Sarah Sze create a fruitful context for Banerjee, who’s had a decades-long, successful career but no solo show here in eight years.
Like those other artists, Banerjee makes evocative creatures and grand yet intricate installations from unusual materials. But her work feels both more omnivorous and more precarious. Her arrangements — of, say, small wooden and porcelain figurines atop a tangle of netting and string, giving way to clusters of horns and glass — are as compelling as they are improbable. They coalesce at the same time that they don’t. Banerjee, who was born in Calcutta and raised mostly in New York, seems interested not just in the imaginative possibilities of hybridity, but also how easily things might shift or come apart.
The show’s centerpiece, “Black Noodles” (2023), commands the gallery, looking like an underwater ruin, and Banerjee’s loose paintings of mythical female figures are transporting. But I kept returning to “Contagious Migrations” (1999—2023), a work that features a two-headed creature of sorts, set against a dizzying sketch of plans for a ventilation system. The plan’s edges are cut into tentacle-like shapes, from which extend medical tubes, some covered in black netting. The piece evokes Covid-19 but is too abstract to be commentary. Instead it’s beautiful, ominous and mysterious. It captures what’s so mesmerizing about Banerjee’s art, and what’s so unsettling. JILLIAN STEINHAUER
