Chitra Ganesh | Tiger in the Looking Glass

Gallery Wendi Norris presents Tiger in the Looking Glass, an exhibition of new paintings by Chitra Ganesh (b. 1975 Brooklyn, New York, USA). One of the most preeminent contemporary artists of her generation, Ganesh opens her fifth solo presentation with the gallery. In this body of work, Ganesh expands upon an iconography that she has been building for more than twenty years, taking it in a lush direction of otherworldly, surreal landscapes. The exhibition takes its title from the motifs and Surrealist themes that weave through Ganesh’s work, such as hybridity, portals and mirrors, double consciousness, multiverses, and femme shapeshifters. 

Drawing and painting form the core of Ganesh’s multi-disciplinary practice, which is rooted in literature, semiotics, queer theory, and historical texts as well as popular and graphic vernaculars like Keith Haring’s subway drawings in New York and hand painted Bollywood posters in India. Exemplified in Tiger in the Looking Glass, Ganesh takes cues from the graphic language of comics and science fiction and interweaves it with Surrealism,  mythological iconography to empower her queer and femme subjects, representations of whom are largely absent from artistic and literary Eurocentric canons. In this exhibition, Ganesh renders the familiar unfamiliar against dense and bountiful environments that evoke the foliage in Rajasthani and Pahari miniature paintings or Henri Rousseau’s jungles. The hybrid figure in the large-scale Enter the Jungle (2024), which inspired the exhibition title, is shown entering a new world without disturbing the harmony of their environment. Interconnectedness and dissonance coexist as Ganesh addresses the world’s need to regenerate and paints a vision of possibility and abundance. This harmony continues in the inky-hued Pond Walk (2024), an inverted version of the lush worlds depicted in the other paintings where a stag and its rider emerge from the ground in glowing, psychedelic silhouettes. The stag stares back at the viewer, as if through an opening or portal. 

Ganesh’s coming of age in the mid-to-late ‘90s in New York around progressive South Asian and queer and trans people of color has deeply influenced her mode of thinking. Her visual grammar forms its own queer vernacular, richly layering and stitching together seemingly disparate styles, creating nontraditional mixed media works that exist in between painting and drawing. This approach informs Alien Abduction (2024) which depicts a superhero-like figure being abducted and transported out of a verdant landscape into a gendered paradigm, as a human-monkey hybrid figure watches with unease. 

Tiger in the Looking Glass opens at a time of heightened global critical recognition for the artist. In 2024 Ganesh was featured in the Sydney Biennale and will be included in the Bangkok Biennale opening in October. Her first comprehensive monograph was recently published by Distanz, featuring essays by leading curators and scholars Natasha Bissonauth, Gayatri Gopinath, Saisha Grayson, Tausif Noor, Svati Shah, and Ksenia Soboleva, and a foreword by Jasmine Wahi. The San Jose Museum of Art named Ganesh an honoree at its 2024 gala in recognition of her storied career. In New York this summer, Ganesh opens dual major multi-disciplinary public commissions for Art at Amtrak at Penn Station and Moynihan Train Hall and is the first artist to take over both transit hubs.