Gallery Espace presents Lava

Mrinalini Mukherjee

Lava

Bronze Sculpture

On view till 15 May 2010; Monday to Saturday, 11am- 7pm



Gallery Espace is proud to present Lava, bronze sculptures by one of India’s most senior artists Mrinalini Mukherjee. Her current body of work has taken three years to complete and includes over 30 sculptures.


Born in 1949, Mumbai, Mrinalini Mukherjee is the daughter of renowned artists Benode Behari and Leela Mukherjee. She studied painting at M S University of Baroda between 1965 and 1970. From 1970 to 1972, she did her post-Diploma in mural design under Prof. K G Subramanyan. Her artistic experimentations have traversed the mediums of natural fiber, wax, ceramic and more recently metal. Her works are well collected world over, featured in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford England, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, U.K, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, NGMA, New Delhi and the Lalit Kala Akademi, Rabindra Bhawan, New Delhi, besides other prominent private collections.


…”Mrinalini Mukherjee’s sculpture invites a much closer reading than her formal repertory and the syncopated way she has of treating it would seem to indicate. The liminal gesture of the hemp knot in her early work has an import whose consequences can be readily followed in all of her production. The predilection that she demonstrates for the counterpoint of the folds, the shimmer, the way she has of using the firing accidents in her ceramic pieces are all variations on this. She takes pleasure in all the surface imperfections – the phenomena of bronze oxidation, the iridescences of the patina, the minuscule asperities of the material – which, far from disturbing the unity of her materials, actually reinforce her intention all the better, for she seeks to confer upon them the illusion of an outer layer that takes on the value of a threshold, a protective envelope, a skin that gives life to all that it covers.


The bronze pieces disclose the presence of an object at their center that resembles a pot at times, a wineskin at others – rounded like a colocynth with its scapes, its leaves and its stems. It is as if Mukherjee were revealing the different stages in the growth of a plant -from its birth under the foliage to the emergence of tubers and finally the majestic blossoming into the light of day. The leaves grow and spread around the axis of her works as if under the effect of a breath, under the impact of an irresistible force. The object that opens and blossoms before our eyes literally emerges from its womb, and in so doing, shows all the signs of its effort to come to light: the jagged, scalloped, serrated, random, indecisive, hesitant motifs, like so many caprices that might pass for natural laws. The body merges with the foliage and is thereby concealed from the eyes of mortals, like the gods or the woodland spirits in certain ancient cultures. As for the material that purports to embody it, it can thereupon only acknowledge the precious paradox of its metamorphoses by way of a lightening or a natural evaporation of sorts…”

— Henry-Claude Cousseau,

Director, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris