Sarnath Banerjee
Fathers (2024)
Courtesy of the artist
Peter Rosegger and Rabindranath Tagore, who competed for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, were contemporaries but never met. In a series of captioned drawings that read like a small graphic novel (a genre for which he is renowned), Sarnath Banerjee deftly explores the parallel timelines of their lives and the huge social and cultural differences between the two national poets.
Unlike Rosegger, Tagore was born to one of Bengal’s wealthiest families. He was a consummate cosmopolitan and a staunch universalist. His views were exotic not only in Europe but, to a degree, in India as well. When Tagore won the Nobel Prize, the Austrian press vented its racist ire on the Bengali poet, while the Styrian parliament moved to lodge a formal complaint. Banerjee examines strange coincidences and commonalities in their biographies and looks beyond the mechanisms of poetic veneration to the human beings behind the myth.
Sarnath Banerjee (1972, Kolkata, India) is a visual artist, author of graphic fiction, and publisher. He uses a surreal style in his work, combining humor and realistic drawings with subtle elements. Banerjee has published four graphic novels with Penguin and HarperCollins, as well as the seventeen-part comic series The Hindu. His work has been exhibited internationally, including Gallery of Losers, which was commissioned by the Frieze Foundation for the London Summer Olympics in 2012 and displayed on billboards around the city. He lives in Berlin.
Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ’24
Drawings and text
Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ’24