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Sreshta Rit Premnath
Foreground: Kite, based on Ludwig Wittgenstein with
William Eccles at the Kite-Flying Station in Glossop, 1910,
photographer: anonymous, 2011,
wood,
thread, nylon, aluminium tube, 195,7 x 90 x 253
cm
Courtesy
of Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin
SRESHTA
RIT PREMNATH
"Storeys End"
September 10th - October 15th, 2011
Storeys End seems a culmination of
Sreshta Rit 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.
Visual puns occur between objects, such as the five
inkjet prints of detective fiction writer Norbert Davis firing
a gun at a target out-of-frame (Toners, Dyes). The
bullet hole seems to appear on an adjacent wall, as a hole
cut-out of canvas (Eclipse). Similarly, the titles of
many of the works play on the relationship between death and
narrative (Storeys End; Toners, Dyes; Doyen’s Rest),
a relationship defining of modern philosophy, art, and
literature (think of Gertrude Stein’s comments about the
structural importance of the corpse in her Everybody’s
Autobiography; think also of Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Blow-Up and L’Aventura, in which the plots
revolve around a corpse or missing person). The corpse of
Storeys End, as in the detective novel, provides a
pivot or absent center around which individual works interact,
becoming visually and linguistically slippery - polysemous and
indeterminate.
Premnath’s works allegorize the indeterminacy of
cognitive-perceptive processes wherein, following Wittgenstein
well-know quip, the ethical becomes embodied by the aesthetic.
The process of bleaching and scraping off photographic
emulsion in EX / X represents a non-site (or
non-sight?) where the viewer’s perception becomes negated
(X-ed out). Likewise, the greenscreen to bluescreen gradient
of Toners, Dyes indicates an absent presence, while
the Ellsworth Kelly-like blue canvas of Eclipse
evokes the nowhere of Bluescreen video technology (wherein
one’s image can become superimposed upon any place
whatsoever). As in many of his works, in Storeys End
Premnath develops a language of displacement and difficulty in
relation to existing cultural materials - detective novels,
philosophical treatises, historically significant
photo-documents, and art historical precedents.
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. (Text by 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 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
residency program, 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. In
2011 he was awarded an Art Matters Foundation Grant. Premnath
is the founder and editor of the magazine
Shifter.
GALERIE NORDENHAKE
Lindenstrasse 34
D -
10969 Berlin
T: +49
30 206 1483
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