Mrinalini Mukherjee

The artist's personal archive is digitised and freely accessible on Asia Art Archive's website.

Mrinalini Mukherjee studied at Surrey Institute of Art & Design, University College and Welham Girls' School. The field of work recorded is art of sculpture. Work by Mrinalini Mukherjee is recorded in the collections of Tate and Museum of Modern Art.

• Name — Mrinalini Mukherjee • Birthplace — Bombay, India • Education — Welham Girls' School Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara West Surrey College of Art and Design • Died — 15 February 2015 (aged 65) • Place of death — New Delhi, India • Known for — Sculpture • Parents — Leela Mukherjee Benode Behari Mukherjee

Mukherjee was born in 1949, in Mumbai, India to artists Benode Behari Mukherjee and Leela Mukherjee. 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. Mukherjee went to study Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Thereafter, she did a Post Diploma in Mural Design from the same university under the Indian artist K.G. Subramanyan who was also a member of the Fine Arts Faculty at the university. Her studies included working Italian Fresco and other conventional techniques. She worked with natural fibres as a medium for murals.

In the 1960s and 1970s Mukherjee used local hemp and jute to create knotted designs outside the macrame designs popular at the time. Her first solo exhibition was held at Sridharani Art Gallery in New Delhi in 1972. It featured warped, woven forms in dyed natural fibresa series of works that brought her recognition. She named her sculptures after deities of fertility and were seen as sensual and suggestive. Mukherjee received a British Council Scholarship for Sculpture in 1971. While most of Mukherjee's early work was characterised by the use of natural hemp fibre, she also used ceramic and bronze later in her career. Her bronze work emerged in the 2000s, "when the artist began casting forms moulded directly in wax using the traditional lost-wax process, whose surfaces she finished with tools obtained from a local dentist". Mukherjee was invited to the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford to participate in an exhibition curated by David Elliott in 1994. The same exhibition further travelled to other cities in the United Kingdom over the course of the next few months. Mukherjee later participated in an international workshop that was held Netherlands in 1996. Around this time she started to experiment with ceramics. In 2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted a posthumous retrospective of Mukherjee's work called "Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee". In her review of the exhibition, art critic Nageen Shaikh observes: "Perhaps the principal lesson that historians, critics, and viewers acquire with an astounding retrospective like Mukherjee's is how art can resist being viewed as delineated under a methodical Western canon. Her massive oeuvre is not fully representational, neither completely abstract. It learns from her native history and tradition, while educating us in new ways to engage with subtleties of her work."

Mrinalini Mukherjee was hospitalized before her 2015 retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. She died a week later, at the age of 65.

The canonical record carries the following identifying particulars.

• Modern Art Oxford, Oxford • Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Yorkshire • Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam • National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi • Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi • Roopankar Museum of Art, Bharat Bhawan, Bhopal • Fine Arts Museum, Panjab University, Chandigarh • India Tourism Development Corporation, New Delhi • India Institute of Immunology, New Delhi • Tate Modern, London • Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh • Museum of Modern Art, New York • The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York