Ganesh’s personal visual language is informed by her longstanding interest in the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) comics created in India in the late 60s, and her recent visual research into erotic and political manga, supported by the Art Matters Foundation. Her images, whether drawn, digitally generated, or combining media, teem with fantastical elements: swarming eyes, psychedelic patterns and colors, distorted female forms, winged weapons, disembodied wounds, and apocalyptic landscapes. Narratives unfold within each frame, as well as across multiple panels. Although the mythological archetypes of power, time, and destiny that Ganesh deploys are timeless, the themes and lines of inquiry she explores, such as gender identity politics, international imperialism, and environmental disaster are as pressing today as ever.

With similar exuberance, her playful, unruly collage style is particularly evident in her installations and drawings. Through these figurative works, Ganesh excavates many cultural definitions of female beauty, and challenges hetero-normative, western definitions of femininity. Ostentatiously decorative, and at times ethereal, bawdy, and confrontational, these pictures traverse genres and material boundaries, incorporating sculptural elements and bursting into three dimensions, challenging conventional, gendered aesthetic categorization.

Gallery Wendi Norris will be publishing a digital catalog of the exhibition with essays by noted Bay Area critics Anuradha Vikram and Christina Linden. Anuradha Vikram is a curator, critic and educator, is Curator for the Worth Ryder Art Gallery and Coordinator for the Visiting Artist Lecture Series for the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley, and a lecturer in Art History at College of Marin. Christina Linden is a freelance curator and writer based in Oakland, California, currently working on upcoming curatorial projects for San Francisco, Oakland, and Vienna. The exhibition Prospectus: Ben Kinmont, on view at SFMOMA through spring of 2013, was a curatorial project undertaken with Frank Smigiel. She studied at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and New York University.

About the artist:
Chitra Ganesh was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, and she graduated from Brown University magna cum laude with a BA in Comparative Literature and Art Semiotics in 1996. In 2001 she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received her MFA from Columbia University in 2002. Her work has been widely exhibited at such venues as, The Andy Warhol Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum of Art, The Asia Society, Bronx Museum of Art, White Columns, Momenta Art, and Apex Art, PS1/MOMA (NY), and internationally at the ZKM (Germany), MOCA Shanghai, Saatchi Museum (London), Kunsthalle Exnergrasse (Vienna), Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaudengo (Turin), Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (Spain), Spazio Oberdan (Milan), Gwangju Contemporary Arts Centre, Gothenburg Kunsthalle Museum (Sweden), and in 2011 at the Prince of Wales Museum (Mumbai). Ganesh is the recipient of numerous grants and residencies, including the 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, Headlands Residency, and awards in 2009 from New York Foundation for the Arts and Printed Matter, and in 2010 from the Art Matters Foundation, Lower East Side Printshop Special Editions Residency, and the Joan Mitchell Award for Painters & Sculptors. Her work is represented in collections of Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Devi Art Foundation, Deutsche Bank, Saatchi Collection, and Burger Collections.

About the gallery:
Gallery Wendi Norris presents a compelling contemporary and modern program with a strong emphasis on the global market. Since 2003, we have worked with over one hundred of the top museums and arts organizations around the world, placing works in their collections and collaborating on solo and group exhibitions. Though, by design, the range of works we show is diverse, a common thread runs through them all: a focus on the human ability to create psychological and spiritual meaning through form and content. Both the artworks and the artists themselves are emblematic of this aesthetic ambition and our trans-cultural nature.

For additional information and images please contact the gallery (415) 346-7812 or email melissa@gallerywendinorris.com.