Born to artist parents in post-partition Bombay and raised in Santiniketan, a utopian community in West Bengal, Mrinalini Mukherjee worked intensively with fibre – and later, bronze and ceramic – for most of her four-decade career, creating an extensive body of work that fused abstraction and figuration with influences from nature, ancient Indian sculpture, modern design, and local craft and textile tradition. In her earliest works, botanic-inspired wall hangings prepared from natural rope made in the early 1970s, Mukherjee experimented intuitively with the ancient Arabic hand-knotting weaving technique of macramé, which she used throughout her life, creating increasingly daring and monumental soft sculptures, which stand tall like divinities. As Mukherjee streamlined her material methodology throughout the 1970s – a handwrought process that involved acquiring and sorting through heavy bundles of rope purchased from New Delhi markets – she conceptualised an increasingly organic approach to her forms. Sometimes suspended from the ceiling, at other times freestanding or positioned against a wall, Mukherjee’s massive sculptures take on characteristics of the living: hued in vegetal oranges, yellows, and purples, voluptuous works like Rudra, Devi (both 1982) and Vanshree (1994), project human sensuality, with folds and bulges closely resembling sexual organs.
Madeline Weisburg
