‘Leela Mukherjee: A Guileless Modernist’
presented by Vadehra Art Gallery
20 March 2024, 6 pm onward
Vadehra Art Gallery, D-40 Defence Colony, New Delhi
A seminal publication on the life and work of the artist, edited by R. Siva Kumar and published by Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation and Tulika Books, will be released at the event.
The exhibition is an ensemble of sculptures along with drawings, etchings, and lithographs expanding on the diversity of mediums and thought exercised by Mukherjee. Primarily a sculptor, Mukherjee developed a practice and relationship with other mediums tracing her exploration of the female body and the feminine through deconstructed- scattered and consolidated-elongated forms. With preoccupations about shaping Indian modernism whilst retaining the conventions of the traditional practice of the Subcontinent, Mukherjee’s works brought the region to the outset of an artistic philosophy that was comfortable in its novelty and reminiscence alike. These works from the 1980s amplified the feminine gaze at a time when the turn of contemporaneity demanded a feminine voice to reverberate throughout arts and philosophy.
For the exhibition essay, art historian Professor R. Siva Kumar writes, “Like many Santiniketan artists, including her husband Benodebehari Mukherjee, Leela saw art as a
calling and a way of life rather than a mere profession. Similarly, she did not see modernism
as an act of revolt but as a natural expression of her innate independence and individuality.
Such an attitude allowed her to draw on different streams of art practice—classical, modern,
and folk, Indic, Western and African—and forge a personal expression of remarkable
coherence and breadth.
Living far away from urban centres of art, shunning the limelight and the pursuit of success,
despite eight solo exhibitions, Leela Mukherjee remained little noticed outside a close circle
of friends and admirers during her lifetime. The present exhibition, bringing together a broad
cross-section of her work as a sculptor and a selection of her prints and paintings, is the most comprehensive presentation of her work to date, and it hopes to put her back into the
discursive space of modern Indian art to which she rightfully belongs.”