I feel astonished when I encounter powerful, oversized female forms in art; they are all too rare. In itself, that is a reason the exhibition of large knotted fiber works by Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee on view at the Met Breuer demands closer attention. Modernist forms expand freely across medium into humble and coarse textiles that recall their origin in a living world. Her hanging gods and goddesses invoke an experience of presence and awe, and they straddle (or collapse) ideas of Western and Indian art. All of which this concise exhibition of some thirty large textile sculptures, rippling with pockets and folds, and smaller groupings of Mukherjee’s ceramics and bronze demonstrates.
A strong hand in the design of the exhibition cuts the Met Breuer’s Brutalist interior into a serpentine path, lilac and neutral curtains delineating alcoves for groupings of the large hanging sculptures. Grouping the sculptures brings individual figures–created separately over many years–into tableaus that suggest narrative. Combined with the curtains, the effect is of refined theatrics. This might trivialize weaker work, but here each piece retains its gravitas. Their frontality, even in clearly three-dimensional works like the above, recalls the line up of a frieze or suggests characters on a stage. The exhibition text suggests that Mukherjee, although not religious, was inspired by Hindu temple carvings and paintings of gods and goddesses. The works are titled with names such as Yakshi (Female Forest Deity) and Rudra (Deity of Terror). Whether looking up at imagery in a temple or at Mukherjee’s larger-than-life sculptures, the intended impact is awe.
Mukherjee began working with rope while an art student in Baroda, India in the 1970s, under the guidance of K.G. Subramanyan. Subramanyan encouraged his students to abandon the Western divide between art and craft, and under his guidance she experimented with ways of braiding and knotting rope. Initial wall hangings quickly grew to embrace all the possibilities of this humble material as she developed ways of knotting that create internal support for her intricate and heavy organic forms. In works like Basanti (She of Spring), she brings a modern aesthetic (a turn to abstraction and an engagement with objecthood) to this rough material that recalls local craft traditions. Basanti was made in the 1980s, when Mukherjee was embarking on her most ambitious attempts to turn fiber into beings that hovered between the plant and animal kingdoms. She began to hang them from the ceiling so that they inhabited space as a free-standing sculpture rather than hanging flat against a wall. They spill out and over themselves, suggesting the growth of plants or the arrangement of organs as much as the human form.
As with flora and fauna, so with sexual organs, which the curator reads particularly in these two later works from the 1990s pictured above. One might understand Pushp (Flower) as one does many works by O’Keefe; in both cases representations of flowers begin to seem more and more like female genitals as you look. Here, it is many times larger than life-size. If Pushp is an enormous vulva confronting the viewer, it is one that exudes lifeforce and creates the sense of a powerful female sexual energy. A more complicated sculpture depicts a woman riding a peacock, that is, mounting a traditionally male animal in a union in which the female is the dominant force. This piece, her first fully free standing work, suggests a union not just of male and female, but human and animal, realms.
Mukherjee began to work more in clay and metal in the 1990s, spurred by a residency at a ceramics center in the Netherlands. She was also working less with rope; it had become more difficult to source and some dyes less available. Installations like the one above show her working with rounded, ribbed, and furled shapes, arising from the ground like plants in a garden. Even in smaller works, Mukherjee takes up space, and it is clear that the natural world is her main source of inspiration.
Mukherjee’s bronze palms likewise echo the natural world of plants and suggest fecundity pushed out to the limits of the natural, with thin leaves unfurling around long stamen. They are grounded in the natural world in their physical positions as well. They lie across the ground, preserved in the twists and furls of their making and with a soft sheen. These forms, much like those of nature, can seem grotesque as much as beautiful. Although concise, this exhibition overall allows one to see the artist expand, develop a mastery over form and material, and then continue on the next medium, from fiber to clay and bronze.
Muherjee’s practice of working in textile set her apart from many artists of her generation, as it has for so many who have gravitated to the medium of cloth and textiles, arts often associated with the home and the work of women. The scale and power of Mukherjee’s fiber works, combined with the controlled, elegant folds and braids that seem to hold them up, gesture to the type of world that might contain them. The phenomenological experiences of the fiber sculptures–how one feels in ones body in the presence of this larger, abstracted monstrous body–is that of an antediluvian past made present. It is well worth seeing in person to have that experience.
Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee is on view at the Met Breuer until September 29, 2019.
