Nature Morte
Frieze London 2019

Nature Morte is proud to participate in the 2019 edition of Frieze London in the Focus section, featuring a solo booth of works by Mrinalini Mukherjee (Indian 1949-2015). Entitled ​Woven, this section is curated by Cosmin Costinas, executive director and curator at Para Site in Hong Kong.

The sculpture of Mrinalini Mukherjee was created from three very different materials: fiber, ceramic, and bronze. But her language was consistent in all three, a startling achievement in handling radically different materials, exploring formal parameters of the figurative, the vegetal, and the abstract.

At Frieze, Nature Morte will present four sculptures by the artist. Starting with a work in fiber from 1996, in which the artist pushed the capabilities of what is possible with the material, inventing entirely new techniques to handle it. In addition, three works in bronze made in 2013 from the final period of her career will be presented. Coming after her experiments with fiber and ceramics, Mukherjee approached bronze as a malleable material, casting both wax elements that she created and found elements from nature, combining them into welded assemblages. Her bronzes appear to be kinetic, molten and primordial, and are radically expressive.

Born in 1949, ​Mrinalini Mukherjee’​s parents were both artists and she spent part of her childhood at Santiniketan, the educational institute in rural West Bengal started by Rabindranath Tagore. In art school, she majored in mural painting, but a chance encounter with local craftsmen ignited her interest in using jute and hemp fibers to create what began as wall-hangings and developed, over the course of thirty years, into elaborate sculptures. Subsequently, she also worked in ceramics and bronze and career retrospectives have been mounted at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi (2015) and the Met Breuer in New York (2019).