HOW TO PLACE AN ARTIST BEYOND THE PHYSICAL MAPPING OF THEIR STUDIO?
WHERE DOES PRACTICE BEGIN OR END WHEN IT TRAVELS ACROSS CITIES, MATERIALS, RELATIONSHIPS, AND DECADES?
WHAT CAN THE REMAINS OF A STUDIO—PHOTOGRAPH SLIDES, NEGATIVES, CONTACT SHEETS, LETTERS, AND LISTS—TELL US ABOUT A PROCESS THAT WAS NEVER FULLY VISIBLE TO BEGIN WITH?
WHAT IF THE ARCHIVE BECOMES A STUDIO OF ITS OWN—WHERE PROCESS CONTINUES NOT THROUGH MAKING, BUT THROUGH REMEMBERING, REFRAMING, AND RE-READING WHAT WAS LEFT BEHIND?
With Mrinalini Through the Studios, we enter the archives in search of the studio of Mrinalini Mukherjee. This exhibition, the first of many, becomes a way of moving with her through the places she worked, the artists she encountered, the residencies and institutions she engaged with, and the works that emerged in between. In doing so, we begin to see the archive not only as a site of retrospection, but as a space of return where process, memory, and material remain active, and where Mukherjee’s legacy continues to unfold, shaped as much by her world as by those who now encounter it anew.
An artist's practice is often inseparable from the sphere it emerges from—the world of materials, processes, influences, and relationships centered in and around a studio. For Mrinalini Mukherjee, the studio was not just a workplace for creation but a dynamic space where her ideas and intuitions took material form, shaped by the tides of her environment. Through her archives, the resonance of that studio extends far beyond its once physical walls, continuing to evolve with each new engagement and reflection, allowing us to see Mrinalini Mukherjee anew—not just as an artist, but as a creator, collaborator, and an individual rooted in the textures of her world.
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The Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation’s Archive houses a remarkable collection of over 2,380 records, documenting Mrinalini’s pioneering career as one of India’s most significant sculptors. The physical archive offers a closer glimpse into her life and practice, encompassing photo documentation of her monumental fiber, ceramic, and bronze sculptures, detailed installation instructions, and other works that illuminate her creative process. The archive also opens windows into her personal and professional realms—letters exchanged with peers like Bhupen Khakhar and Nilima Sheikh, travel photographs with her architect husband Ranjit Singh, and a treasure trove of documents related to her parents, legendary artists Benode Behari Mukherjee and Leela Mukherjee.
The archive is by no definition static. It is a living, breathing extension of her studio—constantly offering new insights as it now unfolds in digital form. In its virtual form, the digital archive is not only an act of safeguarding Mukherjee’s legacy but also a way of reimagining the memory of an artist's workplace through the objects and stories left behind.
When a studio becomes an archive, it reveals itself in new ways—both through what remains and the structures we impose to make sense of it.
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It is tempting to recall Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules, where the act of preservation of seemingly mundane letters, photobooth photos, and newspaper snippets creates a new lens through which to understand an artist’s world. However, Mukherjee’s archive was never conceived as such an intentional accumulation; its fragments now offer their meanings.
The digital archive also offers a way to experience Mrinalini Mukherjee’s practice as a vibrant and multifaceted journey, resisting any fixed or singular interpretation. From her life’s rich body of work, a multiplicity of forms have surfaced —be it the letters, postcards, travel artifacts, photographs, negatives, contact sheets, books, and other material objects, each carrying its own context and narrative. Over the past few years, these fragments have been carefully cataloged and digitized, gaining new layers of meaning and purpose within the ever-expanding realm of ideas and interpretations in the art world.
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Glimpses from the Archive
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Thus, the notion of the studio persists—as a space that continually shifts, expands, and redefines itself. Through Mrinalini Beyond the Studio, we invite you to explore the Mrinalini Mukherjee Archives as both a continuation and a transformation of her life and practice. Through this exhibition, we examine what a studio looks like when pieced together through images and documents. What stories emerge when materials, tools, and traces of process are reassembled and traced back to life. Discover from over 240 personal records, 350 correspondences, vibrant collection of postcards, and hundreds of various ephemeras and publications in our repository— how personal and public histories intersect when the boundaries of the studio dissolve, as tools and materials blend with the traces of life and thought and Mukherjee's enduring legacy continues to evolve.
Welcome to the living, breathing archives of Mrinalini Mukherjee.
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The Barsati Studio
At 21, after completing her studies in Fine Arts in Baroda, young Mrinalini chose to relocate to Nizamuddin East, New Delhi in 1972, where she began to establish herself as a bold, independent sculptor. Mukherjee’s first independent studio in Delhi was the barsati or the rooftop room of her rented house in Nizamuddin East. This space became both a site of creation and a social hub, where she engaged with Delhi’s community of architects, designers, artists, and journalists. The terrace acted as an extension of the studio, working through her early commisions and allowing her to suspend and test the scale of her fiber sculptures in natural light.
In images from these years, the familiar dome of Humayun’s Tomb can often be spotted just beyond the terrace, quietly anchoring Mrinalini’s early experiments within the unfolding cityscape of Delhi.
Click through the images to step into that era.
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THE BASEMENT STUDIO
Pushp in process at Khirki Studio, 1993.
In 1976, Mukherjee received a commission for a large-scale mural at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute in Mauritius. This project required a different kind of studio—one that could accommodate a work of significant scale. She rented a basement studio in Khirki where she could lay out, construct, and refine her massive compositions.
To bring the project to life, she enlisted daily-wage laborers from Bhopal, who were skilled in stringing charpais (woven rope beds). Their technique of interlacing rope with precision mirrored elements of Mukherjee’s fiber work, reinforcing the link between traditional craftsmanship and her sculptural language.
“The guiding principle was the image she had in mind... She would start work in a small room without worrying whether it could be taken out from there. Sometimes, we had to remove the door and its frame just to get the work out—she refused to be restricted.”
— Ranjit Singh in correspondence with Shanay Jhaveri, Phenomenal Forces of Nature 2019
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Khirki Studio Experiments
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THE GARAGE STUDIO
For her British Council show in the 1980s, Mukherjee transformed a garage in New Friends Colony into her workspace. Unlike the openness of the barsati, this space was more enclosed, allowing her to control lighting and texture while focusing on developing intricate surface treatments on her fiber sculptures.
Photographs from 1985 show the garage studio filled with her towering fiber sculptures, floating mid-air as if frozen in motion. The density of hemp made these works physically demanding—some weighing close to a hundred kilos. Mukherjee often spoke of sculpting as an intense, almost combative process, where her own body was fully engaged in shaping, knotting, and maneuvering the material into form. The garage provided a contained space for this labor, allowing her to push the material to its limits while refining its texture and presence.
Assortment of images from the garage exhibition shows Mrinalini Mukherjee posed at work, as the sculptures Devi, Pakshi, and Yakshi suspended and photographed from multiple angles, all come together in the garage-turned-studio.
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A letter from Gulammohammed Sheikh wherein among other things he is congratulating her for the opening of the show and commends for how the garage turned out to be. Sheikh, a longtime mentor and friend from her Baroda days, remained an important voice of support throughout her career.
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Garhi Studios
By the 1980s, Mrinalini Mukherjee moved her practice to Garhi Studios in New Delhi, a multidisciplinary art space established in 1976 by the Lalit Kala Akademi. Designed as an affordable, communal studio complex, it was called Kala Kuteer- to meet the needs of practising artists. Garhi housed artists working across various media—primarily in printmaking, sculpture, and ceramics—with the aim of cultivating an environment of cross-disciplinary exchange among artists.
Following her residency at the European Ceramic Workcentre in the Netherlands in 1996, where she first began working seriously with clay, she returned to Delhi with a renewed interest in ceramics. Unlike the informal, adaptable spaces of her earlier studios, Garhi’s structured environment and access to kilns and shared artist networks allowed for such creative experiements. Garhi provided Mukherjee with the space and facilities to expand her material explorations beyond fiber. Here, she engaged deeply with ceramics, experimenting with glazing techniques and surface textures that would later inform her bronze sculptures. While she continued working with fiber well into the 2000s, the 1990s marked a shift in her material vocabulary.
Thus at Garhi, her engagement with material deepened—while fiber was pliant and organic, ceramic and bronze demanded a different kinds of manipulation and control. Yet, her approach remained consistent in responding intuitively to form, volume, and material resistance.
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Mrinalini Mukherjee at Garhi Studios, preparing a vivid red wax mould as part of the bronze casting process. The wax didn’t need to be dyed, but she chose to anyway.
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Residencies and Studios elsewhere
Through residencies like at the Kasauli Art Centre, or abroad at the West Surrey College of Art and Design or at Oxford's Museum of Modern Art, and later twice at the European Ceramic Workcentre (EKWC) in the Netherlands, Mrinalini Mukherjee’s practice extended well beyond Delhi’s studio ecology. In these transitory and often makeshift spaces, she engaged with unfamiliar materials, refined new techniques, and responded to shifting cultural landscapes. What emerges from the archives are fragments that reveal just how porous the boundaries were between travel, collaboration, and studio practice for Mukherjee during these residencies.Residencies often provide artists with dedicated time, space, and resources to experiment, reflect, and develop their practice outside the demands of their usual environments. For Mukherjee, they became sites of both possibility and constraint. While some offered access to new tools and scales, others required her to improvise in response to material scarcity.
At the West Surrey College of Art and Design, for instance, Mukherjee struggled to find the quality ropes she was accustomed to in Delhi. In response, she began binding rope and long sticks; a solution shaped by necessity, but driven by her instinct for form. In contrast, her time at EKWC opened up the possibility of working at a scale she could not access at home. The state-of-the-art ceramic facilities allowed her to create ambitious, large-scale pieces that explored volume and texture with newfound freedom. However, such experiments proved difficult to sustain back in India, due to the absence of high-quality clay and kiln infrastructure.
Despite these limitations, each residency added a new dimension to her evolving vocabulary showing how moments of adaptation, constraint, and discovery shaped her engagement with scale, form, and material possibilities.
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Mukherjee in her studio during her British Council Scholarship at the West Surrey College of Art and Design, 1978. She used this opportunity to travel within Europe and build lifelong connections.
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In the absence of the quality ropes she was used to in Delhi, Mukherjee began experimenting by binding rope and long sticks—an improvisation shaped by context. Sample of the works she created during her time in England.
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Snapshots from the Kasauli Art Centre, 1977
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Mrinalnin seen working on Wood Spirit with artist Chandrakhant Bhatt.
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Kasauli Art Centre, founded by Vivan Sundaram in 1976, brought together artists, critics, and performers in a close-knit creative environment. These photographs, taken by Sundaram in 1977, captured Mukherjee surrounded by nature and a shared artistic community when she was a part of the second Kasauli Art Centre Artist Workshop.
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Mrinalini Mukherjee with few other artists participating in the Kasauli Art Centre Artist Workshop, 1977.
Artists in this edition included Nagji Patel, Bhupen Khakhar, D.L.N. Reddy, Chandrakant Bhatt, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Amitava Das, Jogen Chowdhury, and A. Ramachandran. -
Mukherjee in a light, almost playful mode posing with a sculpture by Nagji Patel, in the hillside studio in Kasauli far removed from her Delhi routine and setting.
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Notes from Netherlands
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With Mrinalini Beyond the Studio, we enter the archives not only to trace the geographies of Mukherjee’s practice, but to ask what a studio means when it exceeds walls and addresses.
This exhibition, the first of many, becomes a way of moving with her through the places she worked, the artists she encountered, the residencies and institutions she engaged with, and the works that emerged in between. In doing so, we begin to see the archive not as a site of retrospection, but as a space of return where process, memory, and material remain active, and where Mukherjee’s legacy continues to unfold, shaped as much by her world as by those who now encounter it anew.
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In the coming days, the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation will continue to revisit and expand upon these threads through public programs, conversations, and workshops. Stay tuned for updates.
