Reimagining the wild

There is an element of deification in Mrinalini Mukherjee's work, but rather than symbols of religiosity her sculptures acknowledge folkloric forces outside the realm of our understanding

New York’s Met Breuer, which launched with a retrospective of India’s Nasreen Mohamedi in 2016, has chosen to showcase another woman artist, Mrinalini Mukherjee, for its second (posthumous) exhibition of an Indian modernist (on view till September 29). Mukherjee, who died mere days before a career retrospective at New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art in 2015 opened, is a seminal figure in India’s art world whose parentage alone (her father was the well-regarded Santiniketan artist Benode Behari Mukherjee, and her mother, Leela, a rarely acknowledged sculptor) could have paved her way for early visibility. But Mukherjee chose to pursue her practice the hard way, preferring to produce less, if well, in her preferred medium of expression — hemp, for the main part, till environment and commerce rendered the natural fibre as well as dyes difficult to obtain; then ceramic, which too was eventually stymied by inaccessibility to large kilns; and, finally, bronze. Through it all, the context for her work remaind the same, a reimagining of anthropomorphic forms borrowed from nature’s lush, if unsettling, effulgence.

Born two years after independence, summer vacations in Santiniketan fed the young Mukherjee’s soul, but her intellect was honed by Baroda’s Faculty of Fine Arts under her father’s former student, K G Subramanyan. Wanting to escape the banality of establishment collectives but inspired by their search for indigenous materials like hemp (think jute) — a material so commonplace in rural environments that she knew it would be a challenge to gain acceptance in urban milieus — where, inevitably, it was compared to the craft of macramé. Her studios in New Delhi were variously housed at the artists’ complex known as Garhi, or in the urban villages of Khirki and Lado Sarai. Fortunately, she was not driven by the measure of commercial success, much preferring her own trysts with the countryside from where she was inspired to create forms at once familiar but menacing, combining the totemic and goddess-like with the grotesque and primeval. 

There is an element of deification in her work, but rather than symbols of religiosity her sculptures acknowledge folkloric forces outside the realm of our understanding. Her artistic concerns favoured neither form, nor its abstraction, straddling an instinctive middle ground between the two. Recognition took its time but with each passing year her expertise as well as her aspiration to create large sculptures that required armature engineered for support, grew. An exhibition of these warped, knotted sculptures was exhibited to acclaim at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford and elsewhere in England in 1994-95, by which time she was ready to begin exploring other mediums like ceramic following a workshop at Sanskriti Kendra in Delhi’s Anandgram. 

Mrinalini Mukherjee's Vriksha Nata, made in 1991-92, from the collection of KNMA, on view at the Met Breuer, New York

“Phenomenal Nature”, curated by The Met’s Shanay Jhaveri, is an ode as much to Mukherjee’s career as it is to Indian modernism beyond the familiar. “Mukherjee tended somewhat more towards Dionysian unrestraint than total Apollonian discipline, luxuriating in the biodiversity of life forms and the multiplicity it offered,” Jhaveri writes in the exhibition’s catalogue. “The wildness of Mukherjee’s forms does not declare itself to a viewer caught amidst the imposing presences; it invites a gradual apprehension of what constitutes the forms, composed of course of rope, ceramic and bronze and the obvious physical labour invested by Mukherjee, but also of layers of time braided together.” By making the world of 20th-century art more inclusive in allowing audiences a glimpse of artists not strictly associated with the mainstream — of which neither Mohamedi nor Mukherjee claimed any part — the retrospective offers a window to the extraordinary diversity of Indian art that lies, still, unexplored. Some might describe it as an opportunity.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated