Born in Mumbai Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949 - 2015) is the daughter of renowned artists Binod Behari and Leela Mukherjee. She studied Painting at the Faculty of Fine Art, M.S. University, Baroda (1965-1970), and then studied mural design under artists like K.G. Subramanyan, receiving a Post-Diploma in 1970.

Mukherjee's recent bronzes, like her earlier sculptures, are inspired by nature and its energies and elements. They are reminiscent of the artfulness of ancient temples, where the plethora of plant life is abstracted and contained by anthropomorphic statuaries, and where leafy tendrils cover the walls and pillars. Intricately worked, these sculptures encompass the history of the divine icon with its origin in the organic world and the human body, at a stage when all life participated in the sacred.

WORK

Palm Scape I
by Mrinalini Mukherjee
Bronze
2013

Palm scape-IV
by Mrinalini Mukherjee
Bronze
2013

Palm Scape VIII
by Mrinalini Mukherjee
Bronze
2013

ESSAYS

Phenomenal Expressions, Experimental Mediums, Earthy Tones

by Ankush Bhuyan

Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949-2015) made her mark as a sculptor in the 1970s, consistently pushing the boundaries of sculpture and iconography in a career that spanned over four decades. Her radical interventions opened new avenues and paradigms in the Indian art scene through the use of particular mediums,

Totem and Taboo: Mrinalini Mukherjee at the Met Breuer, New York

by Pepe Karmel

Following on its ground-breaking 2016 exhibition of Nasreen Mohamedi, the Met Breuer presented “Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee” from June 4 to September 29, 2019. The Progressive Artists’ Group has been explored in exhibitions at the New York Asia Society (2018) and the Queens Museum (2015),

India Inside Out: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Mrinalini Mukherjee

by Victoria Lynn

Published in Textile, 1:2, 2015, pp. 144-156

Knotting jute into organic forms that resemble large, succulent flowers and fecund figures, Mrinalini Mukherjee created a body of monumental works during the 1990s that have an enduring, at times uncanny, quality. Mukherjee is a leading Indian

The Mrinalini Metaphor

by Geeta Kapur

Death wears a destinal profile. In Mrinalini’s case it was perversely punctual - it appeared just when she was about to behold the display of her life’s work. She was not able to witness the magnificence that prevailed on the occasion of Transfigurations, her retrospective at the National Gallery

Fibre sculptures of Mrinalini Mukherjee

by Krishna Chaitanya

At its profoundest, the relation between nature and man can perhaps be stated thus: nature which has been fashioning beauty eons before the advent of man -- in numberless dawns, in the symmetry of a sea-shell, in the wings of a butterfly -- has evolved to man who can experience that beauty and add to

The knots are many, but the thread is one

by Deepak Ananth

The lessons of this wisdom will have to await the attempt at a textual unravelling of Mrinalini Mukherjee’s work, undertaken with something of the same patience with which her sculptures in hemp fibre have been wrought. The material she uses and the technique of knotting to which it is subject already

Mrinalini Mukherjee