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Mrinal mukherjee

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A contemporary Indian sculptor who worked primarily in natural fibre and bronze, Mrinalini Mukherjee is known for her large, totemic figures and organic forms that depict naturally occurring processes often considered disturbing or unusual. Inspired by nature and Indian folk traditions, her work prioritises the chaos and unsettling aspects of the natural world while remaining grounded in tenets of classical sculpture such as balance, volume and symmetry. Her work also draws inspiration from temple sculptures and carvings but excludes recognisable religious imagery. 

Mukherjee was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) to artists Benode Behari and Leela Mukherjee, and grew up in Dehradun and Shantiniketan where her father taught at Kala Bhavana. In 1965, at the age of sixteen, she enrolled at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University in Baroda (now Vadodara) for a bachelor’s degree in painting, followed by a postgraduate diploma in mural design from 1970 to 1972. During this period, she was taught by the Modernist artist and educator KG Subramanyan, who encouraged her to experiment with Indian

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Mrinalini Mukherjee

Indian sculptor and textile artist (1949–2015)

Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949 – 15 February 2015) was an Indian sculptor. Known for her distinctly contemporary style and use of dyed and woven hemp fibre, an unconventional material for sculpting, she had a career lasting over four decades from the 1970s to the 2000s. Mukherjee's body of work is a part of public collections at, among others, the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; Tate Modern, London;[1]The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;[2] and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. The artist's personal archive is digitised and freely accessible on Asia Art Archive's website.[3]

Early life and education

Mukherjee was born in 1949, in Mumbai, India to artists Benode Behari Mukherjee and Leela Mukherjee.[4] The only child of her parents, she was brought up in the hill town of Dehradun (in present Uttarakhand), where she attended Welham Girls' School, and spent her summer vacations in Santiniketan.[5][6]

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Asia Art Archive
in America

This revelatory monograph explores the work of Indian female sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949-2015). Committed to sculpture, Mukherjee worked most intensively with fibre, making significant forays into ceramic and bronze in the middle and latter half of her career.

Within her immediate artistic milieu in post-independent India, Mukherjee was one of the outlier artists whose art remained untethered to the dominant commitments of painting and figural storytelling. Her sculpture was sustained by a knowledge of traditional Indian and historic European sculpture, folk art, modern design, local crafts and textiles.

Knotting was the principal gesture of Mukherjee’s technique, evident from the very start of her practice. She worked intuitively, never resorting to a sketch, a model or a preparatory drawing. Probing the divide between figuration and abstraction, Mukherjee would fashion unusual, mysterious, sensual and, at times, unsettlingly grotesque forms, commanding in their presence and scale.

In retrospect, Mukherjee’s artistic output appea

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