New Delhi, April 16 (Inditop.com) Veteran artist Mrinalini Mukherjee tries to interweave nature with human figures in her sculptures through a series of spirals, loops and hollows covered in heavy vegetal drapes.
An exhibition, “Lava”, featuring 30 of her sculptures was unveiled at the Gallery Espace in the capital Thursday. The artist is the daughter of the illustrious duo Benode Bihari and Leela Mukherjee.
Mrinalini draws her “artistic energy and elements from nature” in eco-friendly textures like wax, rope, clay and metal. She weaves, fires and casts her material into “complex phallic shapes and mysterious orifices” laced with sexual overtones. The works capture natural light in a play of luminosity and shadow, the gleam of the patinas, varnishes and the iridescence of metal casing.
The bronze casts morph into multiple shapes – beginning with a whorl at the centre – rounded like a colocynth with scapes, leaves and stems. The object that emerges from the foliage of leaves and stems is like a new life from the womb – flowering out in all its glory like pagan god heads.
“My anthropomorphic deities owe much to the equation with awe and reverence that a traditional invocatory deity inspires in her spectator. But my mythology is de-conventionalised like my methods and material,” she said.
French critic and writer Henry-Claude Cousseau recalls that when he first met her in “1994 at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield, Britain where she was a guest artist in the framework of activities of the Henry Moore foundation, she was working on impressive monumental sculptures in coloured hemp fibre, which were at once anthropomorphic and vegetal in inspiration”.
She was exploring the possibility of casting them in bronze.
Mukherjee’s work relates to her Indian origins and experiences, says director of Gallery Espace Renu Mody.
“The affinities with the wonderful craft practices of our country, the spontaneous dialogue between high art and vernacular sources, the interferences between the erotic and the sacred, the sensuality in relation to the lushness of nature and the chromatic atmosphere are at once muted and glowing as the mixture of fear and enchantment that mark her large hieratic figures,” Mody said.
The month-long exhibition will conclude May 16.
