EXHIBITIONS

Samanta Batra Mehta: Search for the Empyrean

Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Gallery
September 29, 2023–February 4, 2024

Samanta Batra Mehta is a mixed-media artist who explores identity, memory, and the interconnection between human experience and the world we inhabit. She investigates how our previous patterns of existence and historical narratives intersect with our present-day lives. As an avid collector, she is drawn to vintage objects, antiquarian maps, and found photographs that she alters to reimagine the past. She superimposes ornamental drawings of botanical subjects, inspired by her grandfather, who was a botanist and agricultural scientist. Her multilayered work is also informed by her personal experience of migrating from Mumbai to New York City as well as her early childhood spent on a ship while her father served in the merchant navy.

This exhibition presents Mehta’s recent work including altered antique books, radios, and globes as well as works on paper. The title of the exhibition is drawn from Mehta’s digital prints, Search for the Empyrean #1 and #2 (2021), which reflect on cosmic and heavenly realms and draw upon history, mythology, and medieval illustration. Mehta has always been fascinated by books, which she voraciously read and collected with her mother in Mumbai. She adorns the covers of books and other found materials with meticulous drawings that often intertwine anatomical imagery with foliage and nature. For Mehta, nature alludes to the body, in particular the female body, and a nexus for fertility, growth, and subjugation. Similar to her embellished books, Mehta’s drawings are collaged on antique globes. She writes: “For me, maps and globes stand as a metaphor for exploration, journeys, possibilities, but also, the untethering from a land (that exists only frozen in sentimental memory).” Through repurposing discarded possessions, Mehta mines her personal experiences to recreate the past and reflect on the human condition.

Artist Bio:
Samanta Batra Mehta’s work has been exhibited at art galleries and museums in the US and abroad including at the Queens Museum of the Arts, the Hudson River Museum, the Hunterdon Museum, the Taubman Museum of Art in the US, Fotografia Cassa di Risparmio di Modena and Museo d’Arte Orientale in Italy and at ‘Reading Room’, a partner exhibition at the Kochi Biennale 2014. Her art fair participations include Bologna Arte Fiere, Artissima, Turin, the Salon Du Dessin Contemporain, Paris, Art Dubai, India Art Fair, New Delhi, Art Stage, Singapore, and Art Basel Hong Kong.

She has had three solo presentations: Cabinet of Curiosities at Shrine Empire, New Delhi, which was nominated for the Forbes India Art Award in 2014, The Journey of Secrets, at Sakshi Art Gallery, Mumbai in 2015, and The Crucible of Fantasy at Art Basel Hong Kong 2015, presented by Shrine Empire Gallery.

Her works are included in various art collections including at Fondazione Fotografia Cassa di Risparmio di Modena in Italy, the RPG Group, India, The Jindal Collection, India, the Birla Art Foundation, India. She was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s 2014-2015 Painters & Sculptors Grant Award. She participated in Wave Hill’s 2020 Winter Workspace Residency in New York and is 2021 SqW:Lab Fellowship recipient.