Overbody: New Works by Sreshta Rit Premnath
September 16–December 6, 2025
Opening reception: Tuesday, September 16, 6-8 pm
Artist’s talk: Tuesday, October 21, 7 pm, Tishman Auditorium
Usdan Gallery presents Overbody, an exhibition of new sculptures, paintings, and weavings by Sreshta Rit Premnath, highlighting the artist’s ongoing investigation of interstitial spaces between bodies and places as sites where care, responsibility, and political action take shape. His practice examines the unreality of borders and the political, social, and material forces that give them form.
In his latest series of sculptures, Premnath expands on his exploration of figure-like forms he calls “slumps” and introduces the concept of the “overbody”—an invisible, vertical force that seemingly presses down upon sculptural forms. This gravitational pressure becomes metaphoric of the coercive force of political power, which disciplines and molds the body into a socialized form. The sculptures resist this pressure through awkward, precarious, and incomplete gestures that assert a quiet defiance.
Though the waxy, gray surfaces of his sculptures evoke a corpse-like stillness, Premnath reclaims gray as a color of potentiality, a zone of becoming rather than stasis. He draws inspiration from architect Kisho Kurokawa’s notion of “Rikyu Grey,” a hue that results from mixing all other colors. This oscillation between deathliness and possibility also aligns with philosophies of the radical dance form of Butoh, which has informed this new body of work.
In collaboration with Premnath, Bennington dance faculty and celebrated Butoh practitioners Mina Nishimura and Kota Yamazaki have created movement scores responding to his sculptures. Offering prompts for the audience, these Butoh scores are presented alongside the artist’s exploratory drawings in the exhibition catalog, which also features a conversation between Premnath and exhibition curator Anne Thompson.
Complementing the ideas in Premnath’s sculptures are three series of works in different mediums.
Vertical ink paintings on Yupo paper, titled Procession, share a common horizon line, below which shadowy forms extend, shifting between suggestions of bodily presence and abstracted negative space. Above, a dominant, dense field of black ink is not an emptiness but a space charged with material richness and motion.
Created by layering mulberry paper and cotton twine, two works titled Passage evoke the pattern of a chain-link fence. The soft twine and fragile, translucent paper combine to suggest the intangibility of borders—often defined more by the allocation of rights than by physical barriers. The weavings are horizontal, like landscapes, and the negative spaces created by pulling apart the fence’s weave, and cutting away the paper can be seen as figurative elements—spaces through which a body may pass.
Finally, the exhibition presents four new examples of Premnath’s “sign paintings.” Resembling exit signs, these two-sided panels feature word pairings wrapping the recto and verso: only one side of a panel, or one word of each pairing, can be viewed at a time. The panels—OVER/BODY, UNDER/SEE, SINK/SOUL and SHADOW/FOLD—emphasize the enjambment, or gap, that simultaneously bridges and breaks the word pairs. Like the fences alluded to in Passage, an exit sign marks a boundary and can be viewed as a point of both departure and arrival. Leaving one place means arriving at another.
Sreshta Rit Premnath is an artist from Bangalore living in New York City and Williamstown, Mass. He has had solo exhibitions at venues including MIT List Visual Arts Center, Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver, and Nomas Foundation in Rome. He is the founding editor of Shifter, a platform that convened public discussions and produced topical publications from 2004-2021. He is an Associate Professor of Art at Williams College.
Image: Detail of Prop 1, 2023-25, encaustic, acrylic and burlap on Aqua-Resin, foam, and steel. Courtesy of the artist.