Suchitra Mattai
Roberts Projects is honored to announce representation of Suchitra Mattai. This announcement follows the gallery’s first exhibition of Mattai’s work – In the absence of power. In the presence of love. – this past July.
The Guyana-born artist explores how memory, myth, and oral traditions can be used to unravel colonial and patriarchal narratives. Drawing from European tapestry traditions, Indian miniature painting, and other craft-based traditions like embroidery and weaving, she imagines a “future space” where new mythologies are formed to celebrate and monumentalize the experiences and labor of brown women. Mattai’s great-grandparents were brought from the state of Uttar Pradesh, India to Guyana, South America as indentured laborers under British colonial rule. Mattai learned sewing, embroidering, and other techniques from her grandmothers and, with every strip of fabric, she meditates on the lives of her maternal lineage.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Suchitra Mattai (b.1973 Georgetown, Guyana; based Los Angeles, CA ) received an MFA in painting and drawing and an MA in South Asian art from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Recent projects include group exhibitions at the MCA Chicago, ICA Boston, Crystal Bridges Museum, Akron Art Museum, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Sarasota Art Museum, the Sharjah Biennial, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Tampa Museum of Art, the MCA Denver, and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and solo exhibitions at the Boise Museum of Art and MSU Denver.
Upcoming solo exhibitions include ICA San Francisco, Tampa Museum of Art, Socrates Sculpture Park and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Her works are represented in collections which include Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Joslyn Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art (Maine), the Shah Garg Collection, the Jorge Perez Collection, the Tia Collection and the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Mattai is also a recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.
