Ranu Mukherjee | The Long Middle
Gallery Wendi Norris
436 Jackson Street, San Francisco
Opening reception, May 20, 5 – 7 pm
Over the last thirty years, Ranu Mukherjee (b. 1966, Boston, MA) has developed a multidisciplinary practice that questions Western and human-centric ideas about intelligence, resilience, and survival, imagining a more tender and attentive way of relating to the world. This sensibility animates the eight new paintings she created for The Long Middle, Gallery Wendi Norris's sixth solo exhibition with the artist.
Borrowing its title from cultural theorist Lauren Berlant's phrase "the long middle of change," the exhibition reflects on our current paradigmatic shift as Mukherjee merges the autobiographical with the political, ecological, and geological—linking the pressures of mid-life, motherhood, and personal transformation with the threats of climate crisis, resource extraction, and species loss.
In Mukherjee’s paintings, the transitional conditions of The Long Middle arise through layered textile surfaces, geometric shards, and an interest in the tension between the static image, choreographed performance, and lived experience. She builds her paintings from pigment, crystalina, and ink printed on cotton jamdani and silk sari on linen, which acts as an architectural screen that simultaneously reveals and conceals what lies beneath it. She also deploys shards of geometric forms that cut through organic painted imagery—a technique she used to striking effect in her 2025 commission for the San Francisco Ballet curtain drop—which, like her cloth overlays, introduce a layer of visual dissonance that disrupts the expected syntax of each scene.
Mukherjee looks as much to the plant and animal worlds as the human one, from organisms that thrive not through urgency or force but through an intimate sensitivity to their changing surroundings. In healers (2026), Mukherjee depicts a field of yellow rattle, a plant that weakens dominant grasses and creates space for biodiverse wildflower meadows. A layer of silk sari cloth, also printed with a cellular honeycomb-like pattern derived from digitally abstracted protest imagery, stretches across more than three-quarters of the canvas and extends a quarter-inch above the surface, partially obscuring the scene beneath it while keeping the composition in motion.
Though plants and animals function as Mukherjee's primary protagonists, human figures recur throughout the exhibition. In men being tender (2025), two former wrestlers discover unexpected gentleness in an improvised duet, sharing the canvas with ashwagandha and saffron, plants long used in Ayurvedic medicine to support balance and restoration. Together, the wrestlers and the botanicals propose a shared vocabulary of recovery.
About RANU MUKHERJEE
Ranu Mukherjee (b. 1966, Boston, MA) works across painting, moving image, installation, and performance. Her practice brings together saturated color, layered material processes, and shifting temporal structures to explore questions of visibility, abstraction, ecology, migration, and non-human agency. Drawing on Indian textiles, print, pigment, animation, and choreography, Mukherjee creates densely layered works that reflect on possible futures, diaspora, mythology, and the afterlife of colonial histories.
Mukherjee has presented solo exhibitions at the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; the San Jose Museum of Art; the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica; and the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, among others. Her work has also been shown internationally in exhibitions and biennials including the Singapore Biennale and the Karachi Biennial. She is the recipient of The Ruth Award, Ruth Foundation for the Arts (2026), the Artadia San Francisco Bay Area Award (2023), and a Pollock-Krasner Grant (2020).
Mukherjee received her BFA in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA in 1988, and her MFA in painting at the Royal College of Art, London, UK in 1993. Mukherjee lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, and is Dean of the School of Film/Video at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).
