Bowdoin College Museum of Art acquires work by Chitra Ganesh

Hales is delighted to announce that Chitra Ganesh's 2023 work All the Farewells has been acquired by Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, USA, through the Collector’s Collaborative Fund and The Laura T. and John H. Halford Jr. Art Acquisition Fund.

 

Across a twenty-year practice, Ganesh has developed an expansive body of work rooted in drawing and painting, which has evolved to encompass animations, wall drawings, collages, computer generated imagery, video, and sculpture. Through a multidisciplinary approach, Ganesh 'constantly attempts to challenge patriarchal norms and empower her female and queer subjects by constructing alternate visual narratives', while drawing on South Asian visual traditions as well as canonical and contemporary feminist and queer scholarship. 

 

All the Farewells evokes the sublime with a central figure in the sea, looking out into a landscape framed by an ornamental arch. It is part of a series of recent, large scale works which depart from the seriality of earlier prints to situate the viewer in a singularly immersive scene. Protagonists exist in energetic connection with environment and alchemy, and experience transformative states of becoming. In composition and concept, the works are in conversation with art historical themes such as surrealism and the sublime. Ganesh’s speculative iconography explores temporalities and liminal spaces between life and death to reveal both the precarity and generative possibility of our contemporary every day.