Biography of Chitra Ganesh
Flamboyant, unsettling and occasionally gruesome, the artwork of Chitra Ganesh focuses mainly on feminist narratives using iconography drawn from popular culture and South Asia. Although not religious, her works teem with visual references from Hinduism and Greek mythology. Women feature plentifully in her work, and are often portrayed with magnified energy, power, and heightened eroticism.
Highly engaged in contemporary politics and contemporary literature, Chitra Ganesh works in painting, digital photography, installation and collage. Her highly-regarded digital collages reference the work of famous author Amar Chitra Katha, whose books were supposed to pass on Indian history and narratives to children. Her artworks often give voice to the marginalized, focusing on the individual subjective experience, especially the plight of women in modern India and their subservient role to men.
Born in 1975 in New York to immigrant Indian parents, Chitra Ganesh grew up in Brooklyn and Queens and regularly visited India. After attending Brown University, she received her MFA from Columbia University in 2002.
In 2010 she was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painting and Sculpture, and in 2012 she was received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in the Creative Arts. She featured in the exhibition “Charlie” in 2002 at MoMA PS1 in New York. In 2012 she had a solo exhibition at the Gothenburg Kunsthalle in Sweden. Her work Eyes of Time held a prominent position in the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2014-15.