Nothing is Yours
Loren Eiferman and Madhurima Ganguly
River House Arts, New York
by William Corwin, April 5, 2025
Loren Eiferman, Satellite (2010).
Flowing and writhing mythological energies resonate between the work of Loren Eiferman and Madhurima Ganguly, two very distinct artists who seem unified in their aesthetic aims. Pulling from a wide variety of sources, a universal and collective mythology for Ganguly and medieval botanical and medicinal manuscripts for Eiferman, both artists offer a proscription against superficial and seductive attraction. Instead we are treated to a visual feast of beautiful yet threatening and sometimes violent fertility: a fecund blossom whose nectar may beguile or even kill us, or a gorgeous tiger or arachnid for whom we are the prey.
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Lunaria (2024) by Eiferman is a tall gangly tendril with six surreal blooms, each one a circle with a small sphere floating at center. Are they eyes watching us? Eiferman’s sculptures are often pulled from the pages of botanical encyclopedias, and while the tangled root systems, contorted stems and fearsome buds are meticulously crafted from small lengths of found and recycled wood, the works straddle both drawing and sculpture and the tradition of flattening herbs and flowers between the pages of a book in order to preserve them. Lunaria plays with its flatness, and the eyes disappear, as the whole image dissolves into the width of the medium as we pass around it. Satellite (2010) on the other hand, takes Eiferman’s drawing/sculptural practice in the opposite direction, becoming an organized, yet tangled accumulation of wooden lines, which like an organic wireframe model delineate the space inhabited by the artist’s mystic bloom.
Madhurima Ganguly, Body Mushroom (2024)
Loren Eiferman, 9 V Nature's Power (2021)
Ganguly’s work engages with a very elemental and mythological set of desires; nurturing, hunger, and growth. Her mostly female figures simultaneously suckle, devour, sprout and decay, with little sense of pity or sympathy—they live and die like the Gods and Goddesses, all part of a cyclical, beautiful and cruel world. In Jaal (Net) (2024),a female torso erupts into a mass of hands with red-tipped fingers, while a hungry tiger observes from behind. Does this transformation depict the end of one being and the beginning of another, or a consumption by one of the other? The net implies a trap, but also a web. Play (2025) also features a web and a tiger, while in the foreground a woman’s head, with Bindi, seems to grow into another spider-like creature: her black hair elongates into four tentacles, while a set of disembodied limbs (no body is present) form the necessary total of 8. Again and again in Ganguly’s imagery, the lifeblood of one being is the nourishment of another: in Death in Body (2023), three female heads lap up the red fluid from another woman’s loins, and in Apocalypse (2025) a supine woman is nourished at the teat of the black and lightning festooned cloud of chaos itself.
Eiferman’s vegetal forms play with naturally occurring patterns: of leaves, buds, roots, pistils and stamens. In the wall piece 9V/Nature’s Power (2021) three stalks offer a theme-and-variations on the placement of delicate leaves on a stalk: some run parallel, others alternate-its engrossing. In the freestanding 54/v (2017), two hemispherical stalks are again compared—one with perky sharp leaves projecting upwards (think the plates on the back of a stegosaurus), and the other with droopy buds hanging down. We would not necessarily demand a direct symbolic reading of these forms, except that in the presence of Ganguly’s paintings and drawings, such as whisper (2024) where a mass of breasts and red spheres are perched atop a crouching pair of legs, or Body Mushroom (2024) where four female heads appear to vomit forth red petals. This pairing of Ganguly and Eiferman insists we read the Eiferman’s sculptures as metaphors for human affairs, and Ganguly’s tangled limbs and protuberances as aspects of vegetal cycles. This interconnectedness of human and plant, as well as the tight interconnectedness of bodies in both works; the webs, the knots of tendrils, leaves no room for a selfish sense of ego or individual action beyond the confines of fluid collective action, and lends credence to the show’s title, Nothing is Yours.
Madhurima Ganguly, Jaal (Net), 2024
Madhurima Ganguly, Apocalypse (2025)