The Thick of TIme

Chitra Ganesh is an internationally recognized artist with a wide-ranging practice and is a graduate in semiotics – the study of cultural symbolism – as well as fine arts. The Thick of Time  presents a  selection of large scale prints created over the  past 12 years and a new animation titled Coherence. The prints are packed with potent symbols and inspired by a variety of  aesthetic idioms including comics, mythology, science fiction, and psychedelic poster art.  All of the works on view center female/femme protagonists, often chronicling states of transformation and desire, and emerge from the artist’s long held formal engagement with comics and prints in the form of books, compendia, and billboards.

Ganesh’s graphic works are inspired by a wide range of narrative and print cultures, drawing from iconography, or the centuries old visual representations of moral emblems in works like Melancholia: {The Thick of Time} , to psychedelic rock posters, Ukiyo-e prints, and the Amar Chitra Katha, a series of children’s comics which were first published in India in  the 1960s, intended to educate young readers about Indian history, religion and myth. Ganesh extends and subverts these forms, and plays with mythological symbolism to raise questions rather than shape sureties about human existence. Ganesh works explore  a sense of  fragmentation and dissonance that speaks to contemporary realities of conflict, power, and desire, and precarity of balance between humans and the environment. The artist draws upon mythic forms of figuration to offer audiences  powerful female protagonists express agency and self determination. This is Ganesh’s first time showing her work in Thailand.