Mrinalini Mukherjee

Mrinalini Mukherjee was born in Bombay in 1949 to two artists, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Leela Mukherjee. She went to school at Welham Girls’ in Dehradun and then to the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, where she studied painting and took a post-diploma in mural design under K G Subramanyan. A British Council scholarship in 1971 took her to the West Surrey College of Art and Design in England.

She trained as a painter. Her material became rope. She worked mainly in hemp fibre, knotted into large, soft forms that look alive: part plant, part body, part temple sculpture. Some have names from Indian myth, like Yakshi (1984), now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Her first solo show was at Sridharani Gallery in New Delhi in 1972. In 1994 David Elliott showed her at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. Later she worked in ceramic, and from the 2000s in bronze, carrying the same organic shapes into harder materials.

In January 2015 the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi opened a retrospective, Transfigurations. She was taken to hospital as it opened and died in New Delhi on 2 February, aged 65. In 2019 the Metropolitan Museum of Art showed a posthumous retrospective, Phenomenal Nature, at the Met Breuer. Her sculpture is now at Tate Modern, the Stedelijk and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, among others.