PAST EXHIBITIONS:

RINA BANERJEE AND GORAN TOMCIC

Opening Reception, Thursday, February 3, 6-8 PM

SUITE 106 Gallery is pleased to announce the two-person exhibition of New York-based artists Rina Banerjee and Goran Tomcic. The show includes collages, mobiles, and installations. Rina Banerjee and Goran Tomcic tap into an ethereal world while incorporating elements from their respective countries. Whether delicate or dizzying, they both use familiar materials to construct art that quietly radiates – accessible yet not penetrable.

Goran Tomcic’s mobile installation Wild Cyclamen, inspired by an endangered wildflower, exudes elusivity and fragility. Underneath the intricate mobile, blossoming flowers nestle in a gathered bed of the delicate, golden threads. The symbiosis of place and time is highlighted in his mobiles, which balance the fusion of memory and reality and subtlely charge the space around them. In his collage Gold, Tomcic defies the work’s physical flatness by using holographic paper to play with light and depth.

Rina Banerjee’s large-scale drawings are based on narrative fables within an Indian vernacular. Her work explores contradiction – in Two Figures Pollinating in Nature, roots of a plant are visible, yet do not ground the flower in soil. While the fairy-like figures hover above faded text, the interplay of the ornament and cryptic words add a conceptual dimension to the work. In Puff Puff, a mixed media piece on paper, an abstracted girl is suspended, drenched in metallics that both illuminate and trap her, highlighting the tension between her splendor and her entrapment.

Rina Banerjee was part of the Whitney Biennial in 2000. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and in 5 x 5 at Whitney Philip Morris. She has recently given lectures at the ACSAA (symposium lecture), CAA, Asia Society, and various universities.
She will be in Fatal Love, an exhibition at the Queens Museum in February.

Goran Tomcic has been living in the United States since 1991. He was a curator of contemporary art at Miami Dade Community College and at the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, OH. A Shimmering Heart (Silver), his solo show at Participant, Inc. opens February 13th.

For further information or visuals, please contact the gallery.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday 11am – 6pm.