Prema Murthy (born 1969, Seattle, WA) received her MFA from Goldsmiths College, London. She has exhibited her video, prints, and installations in numerous exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad including the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Generali Foundation in Vienna, The National Gallery in Capetown, The India Habitat Center in New Delhi and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. She is the co-founder of the collective Fakeshop, which was included in the 1999 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria and the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Her work is in private and public collections including the Neuberger Berman Collection and the collection of the Queens Museum. In June 2007, she had a solo exhibition at PS1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center in New York. She lives and works in New York.

In her work, Murthy weaves in and out from the physical to the digital. Murthy presents us with dichotomies that are relevant when considering contemporary India’s both particular and universal identities in the age of globalization: the handmade and the digital, the traditional and the hi-tech, the local and the international. Yet ask her who her more contemporary artistic influences are, and she’ll cite a trio of women artists with very different backgrounds and styles, yet when considered in the context of Murthy’s own vision make sense: Yayoi Kusama, Eva Hesse, and Amrita Shergil. Clearly, Kusama’s obsessive treatment of patterns, Hesse’s interest in the impermanent and appropriating the industrial into art-making, and Shergil’s mix of Eastern and Western styles, all come into play in Murthy’s work, especially in Organizing Energy. It’s as if Murthy had called upon creative energies of these three important female artists and organized them into a new, up-to-the-minute vision that is both reverential to their work and distinctively Murthy’s own.