MEERA MUKHERJEE (1923 - 1998)
MEERA MUKHERJEE (1923 - 1998)

Untitled

Details
MEERA MUKHERJEE (1923 - 1998)
Untitled
bronze
8 x 7 x 12½ in. (20.3 x 17.8 x 31.8 cm.)
Executed circa 1970s

Lot Essay

Borrowing inspiration from folk traditions and everyday urban life, Meera Mukherjee's works have an immediacy that transcends into the contemporary. Deeply inspired by the tribal Dhokra metal casting technique of Bastar in Central India, the artist perfected a technique for her sculptures in bronze that was unique. Mukherjee's innovative process and approach to bronze constituted sculpting the works first in wax and then building up the surface with wax strips and rolls, to bestow a tactile finish to the bronze they were eventually cast in. As a consequence, each of her sculptures is unique, and appears organic and malleable, as if imbued with natural lyricism and rhythm, capturing a dynamic moment in time.

"Almost always, Meera sought to project her ideas and thoughts through the human element - for most part of her creative endeavor, her subjects were drawn from amongst the people and personalities she encountered all around her in everyday, day-to-day life. These were not necessarily exceptional mortals, not the heroic monumental, but people from a domain comfortably down-to-earth, often belonging to the toiling and struggling community. It was this innate inclination which gradually transmuted into a deliberate and impelled choice, so that it was through the breath of life from characters and events such as those she tried to articulate, that her work transformed into vehicles of intimate expression, touching upon a wider philosophy of life through the most mundane and the intimate." (Remembering Meera Mukherjee, exhibition catalogue, Kolkata, 2012, p. 79)

More from South Asian Modern + Contemporary

View All
View All