Chitra Ganesh

Chitra Ganesh's (b. 1975, Brooklyn) visual vocabulary draws from broad-ranging material and historic reference points, including surrealism, expressionism, Hindu, Greek and Buddhist iconographies, South Asian pictorial traditions, 19th-century European portraiture and fairy tales, comic books, song lyrics, science fiction, Bollywood posters, news and media images. The process of automatic writing is central to her practice and emerges from dissecting myths to retrieve critical moments of abjection, desire, and loss. By layering disparate materials and visual languages, Ganesh considers alternate narratives of sexuality and power.
 
Ganesh's work has been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions have been staged at the Calgary Contemporary, Alberta; Leslie Lohman Museum, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; MoMA PS1, NY; The Kitchen, NY; The Rubin Museum of Art, NY; The Andy Warhol Museum, PA; Gothenburg Kunsthalle, Sweden; and Times Square, NY. Her work has also been exhibited in group exhibitions across the United States, including at The Walker Art Center, MN; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; The Queens Museum of Art, NY; The Asia Society, NY; The Bronx Museum, NY, The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; and the Boca Raton Museum of Art, LA, among others. Ganesh's work as also been widely exhibited across Europe and Asia, including at the Hayward Gallery, London, Saatchi Museum, London; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Italy; Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Italy; the ZKM Center for Art and Media, Germany; Göteborgs Konsthall, Germany; Arthotek Kunstverein, Göttingen, Germany; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; the Gwangju Contemporary Arts Centre, Korea; the Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai; Indira Ghandi National Centre for Arts, Devi Art Foundation; the Dhaka Art Summit, among others. Her work was recently featured in the 24th Biennale of Sydney Ten Thousand Suns and the Hawaii Triennial 2022 Pacific Century – E Ho‘omau no Moananuiākea. 

Ganesh is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Printed Matter, and the Art Matters Foundation; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in the Creative Arts; the Lower East Side Printshop Special Editions Residency, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painters and Sculptors, and is the 2017-2018 recipient of the distinguished Hodder Fellowship from the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. Ganesh's work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Brooklyn Museum; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Cincinnati Art Museum; The Ford Foundation; the Devi Art Foundation; Kiran Nadar Museum; the Saatchi Collection; Burger Collection; Deutsche Bank; The Newark Museum of Art, among others. Her work has been featured in publications, including The New York Times, Artforum, Hyperallergic, ArtNews, ArtNet News, Vogue India, Elle India, Harper's Bazaar India, San Francisco Chronicle, Art Asia Pacific, among others. Ganesh graduated from Brown University with a BA in Comparative Literature and Art-Semiotics; she earned her MFA from Columbia University. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.