SRESHTA RIT PREMNATH
STOREYS END
Opening Friday, September 9, 18.00-21:00 pm
September 10 – October 15
Galerie Nordenhake has the great pleasure to present Sreshta Rit Premnath’s first solo exhibition in Europe. Employing diverse formats and media in his work the artist explores how Otherness is constituted through complex matrices of knowledge, power, subjugation, and mediation by engaging with forms of interrogation and representation.
"The exhibition Storeys End seems a culmination of Premnath’s engagement with the Viennese philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who undoubtedly acts as a kind of muse for the artist. Like Wittgenstein, Premnath relishes philosophical, linguistic, and cultural aporia. In Storeys End, named after the address where Wittgenstein composed his posthumous text, On Certainty, and died shortly thereafter, the viewer is presented with a detective plot redolent with post-modernist obsessions.
Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptual Art offer Premnath an art historical language game, like so many of his generation who have returned to the "scene of the crime" of their parent and grandparent generations. But this game cum crime story also takes place between multiple media, which include photography, sculpture (the partial reconstruction of a kite designed by Wittgenstein in 1909), and painting.
Premnath’s installation pushes against the limits of a particular universe of meaning, the work of art measuring the limits of a world-the personal and collective capability to understand in situ through a set of linguistic and visual propositions. By entering into the work, the viewer encounters the artifacts of the artist’s research practice, which move seamlessly between philosophical speculation and humor. In the narrative tension of these objects, stories actually begin rather than end. Objects mark the mobile traces of our compulsion to make meaning faced with negation, absence, aporia, and gaps within signifying processes." (Thom Donovan)
Sreshta Rit Premnath was born 1979 in Bangalore, India and lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from Bard College, NY and was a 2008 studio fellow at The Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2009 he participated in the residency program of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME.
Premnath has been exhibiting internationally since 2004. In 2010 he presented the solo project Zero Knot at Art Statements, Art Basel. His work has been shown at Gallery SKE in Bangalore; Balice Hertling in Paris; as well as at Thomas Erben Gallery, Friedman Benda, Rotunda Gallery, Art in General, and Bose Pacia (all New York); and at 1A Space in Hong Kong. Later this year he will participate in exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco and at Wave Hill, New York. 2011 he has been awarded the Art Matters Foundation Grant. Premnath is the founder and editor of the magazine shifter.
September 10 – October 15, 2011
Tuesday – Saturday 11:00 – 18:00