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