Mrinalini Mukherjee

Background

Mrinalini Mukherjee was born in 1949, in Bombay (now Mumbai), Maharashtra, India. She was the only child in the family of Benode Behari Mukherjee and Leela Mukherjee, both artists.

Education

Mrinalini Mukherjee spent her childhood in a town of Dehradun where she received her general education.

In 1965, Mukherjee entered the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda where she studied painting, printmaking, and mural making for five years. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in painting. In a couple of years, she also earned a Post Diploma in Mural Design she had studied under the teacher of her father, a well-known Indian artist K.G. Subramanyan.

Career

The start of Mrinalini Mukherjee’s career can be counted from 1971 when she received a Scholarship for Sculpture from a British Council. The grant provided her with a job at West Surrey College of Art and Design (later known as Surrey Institute of Art & Design) where she raised to prominence with her tied-fiber works. She spent seven years at the institution.

The first solo show of the sculptor was held in 1972 in New Delhi’s Sridharani Art Gallery. Mukherjee presented to the audience her bowed woven sculptural compositions from natural fibers colored with a dye. The titles of the works were borrowed from the names of fertility deities.

Another major event for Mukherjee was a solo exhibition held in 1994 at the Museum of Modern Art at Oxford (currently Modern Art Oxford). It was later shown through several cities of the United Kingdom. Two years later, the sculptor demonstrated her works at an international workshop held in Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands.

In addition to many shows in her native India, Mrinalini Mukherjee also took part at the international exhibitions during the course of her career, including those in France, Belgium, Australia, Russian Federation, Sweden, Japan, and South Korea.

By the beginning of the 21st century, Mrinalini Mukherjee adopted bronze and ceramic as the media for her sculptures. Till the end of her life, she produced a number of works in organic forms using the lost-wax casting technique.

Achievements

• 

  Mrinalini Mukherjee is considered as one of the notable representatives of contemporary Indian art.
  
  Mukherjee’s works are acquired by such well-known collections, as the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, Modern Art Oxford, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and London’s Tate Modern.
  
  In 2014, Mukherjee’s sculpture ‘Sri (Deity)’ was purchased at Sotheby's in London for $158,310.

Works

More photos

• sculpture

  • Memorial II

  • Memorial I

  • Matrix VII

  • Arboreal Enactment, Night Bloom 2, and Forest Flame IV

  • Rudra

  • Yogini

  • Palm Scape-II

  • Palm Scape III

  • Palm Scape VII

  • Bouquet I

  • Landscape (Triptych)

  • Landscape XVI

  • Landscape XVII

  • Cluster V

  • Jauba

  • Waterfall

  • Night Bloom VI

  • Black Devi

  • Adi Pushp II

  • Untitled

Views

Mrinalini Mukherjee took inspiration for her sculptures from common sculptural traditions of India and Europe, folk art, modern design, as well as from crafts and textiles typical for the area where she was born and raised. The same was for hand-dyed ropes she used. The sculpture never sketched and created her works by intuition.

Knotting most of her sculptures from organic materials, Mukherjee never used loom in order to provide the figures with volume and monumentality.

Quotations: "My mythology is de-conventionalised and personal, as indeed are my methods and materials. [...] My idea of the sacred is not rooted in any specific culture. To me it is a feeling that I may get in a church, mosque, temple, or forest. [...] My inspiration and visual stimuli come from all over the world, from museum objects and artifacts and more immediately from my environment."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "As if in harmony with the vegetable realm from which her medium is derived, the leading metaphor of Mukherjee’s work comes from the organic life of plants. Improvising upon a motif or image that serves as her starting point the work’s gradual unfolding itself becomes analogous to the stirring into maturation of a sapling." Deepak Ananth, art historian, and independent curator
  
  "[Mukherjee] always enjoyed subverting conventions. She [preferred] to explore the hidden character of the material, its tactile potential, its ability to express a daring yet subtle eroticism, its power to contain within it an organic fecundity.” Ella Datta, art critic

Connections

Mrinalini Mukherjee remained unmarried throughout her life.

Father:

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Mother:

Leela Mukherjee

mentor:

K. G. Subramanyan

References

• Mrinalini Mukherjee This revelatory monograph explores the work of the notable Indian sculptor.
  2019