Benode Behari Mukherjee: After Sight

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Indian artist Benode Behari Mukherjee (1904–1980) at the gallery’s London location. The first solo presentation in Europe devoted to Mukherjee, the exhibition will focus on the artist’s collages from the late 1950s and 1960s, after he lost his sight.

A pioneering Indian modernist, Mukherjee blended imagery and iconography from Indian life with a signature visual style influenced by Indian, East Asian, and Western art practices and traditions. Mukherjee studied with the celebrated artist Nandalal Bose as one of the first students at the renowned Kala Bhavana, the fine-arts institute founded by the poet Rabindranath Tagore at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal. The curriculum of Kala Bhavana was structured similarly to that of the German Bauhaus (Tagore travelled to Europe often, and he visited the Weimar Bauhaus in 1921), with students encouraged to explore form and style in an open manner with various mentors. Rather than depicting mythological or nationalistic imagery, common themes and subjects among Indian artists at this time, Mukherjee examined nature and his immediate surroundings. He created works in a variety of media, from graphite drawings to wall frescoes, all of which exhibit a deeply modernist yet highly individualistic and contextually specific sensibility towards form, color, and composition. As art historian Juliet Reynolds writes: ‘[Mukherjee’s] attempt… was to reconcile Indian folk and classical art with far-eastern calligraphic painting, European early-Renaissance conventions and modern idioms.’¹

The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, who represents the estate of the artist. Several of the works on view will be on loan from the collection of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.

Image: Benode Behari Mukherjee, Reclining Man, 1957 (detail). © Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation. Photo by Nemai Ghosh

¹Juliet Reynolds, ‘On a Wider Canvas’, India International Centre Quarterly (Winter 2006–Spring 2007), p. 60.

Location

24 Grafton Street London W1S 4EZ

Dates

January 10—February 22, 2020

Private view

Thursday, January 9, 6–8 PM

Artist

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Press Release

After Sight

“We may say that art holds together the extremes of the visible and the invisible, the objective and the abstract by a kind of magnetic power.” —Benode Behari Mukherjee

Image above: Benode Behari and Leela Mukherjee, 1978. Photo by Nemai Ghosh. Courtesy Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Reclining Man, 1957

Collage on paper

7 1/2 x 9 inches (19.1 x 22.9 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/8 inches (57.4 x 41.7 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

3 PM, 1965

Collage on paper

7 1/2 x 10 inches (19.1 x 25.4 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/8 inches (57.4 x 41.7 cm)

This is the first solo exhibition in Europe of the work of one of India’s most celebrated modernists. His collages—part of the new aesthetic territory he embraced after losing his sight aged fifty-three—express rhythm and tension in new ways, furthering the artist’s approach to abstraction born of experience and contemplation.

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Collage with Fish, 1958

Collage on paper

7 4/5 x 9 4/5 inches (19.8 x 24.9 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/8 inches (57.4 x 41.7 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled

Collage on paper

7 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches (19.1 x 26.7 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/8 inches (57.4 x 42 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, 1959

Collage on paper

10 x 10 inches (25.4 x 25.4 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches (57.5 x 42.4 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled

Collage on paper

16 1/2 x 25 7/8 inches (41.9 x 66 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 32 1/8 inches (57.4 x 81.5 cm)

Like Ruth Asawa, Mukherjee was a student of Bauhaus thinking thanks to his studies and subsequent teaching at the famous Kala Bhavana arts institute in Northeast India. Watch The Inner Eye, a film about Mukherjee directed by his student, Satyajit Ray, in 1972.
(© 1972 Films Division, Government of India)

The ideas on which the school was founded—that art unfolds in a liberated, expanded territory connected with nature, experience, and wider cultural developments—were to change the course of Indian art.

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Ink on paper

13 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches (34.3 x 24.1 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches (57.5 x 42.4 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Dancer, n.d.

Ink on paper

13 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches (34.3 x 24.1 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches (57.4 x 42.4 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Dancer, n.d.

Ink on paper

13 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches (34.3 x 24.1 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches (57.4 x 42.4 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Ink on paper

11 x 15 inches (27.9 x 38.1 cm)
Framed: 16 3/4 x 22 5/8 inches (42.4 x 57.4 cm)

He created works in a variety of media, from graphite drawings to wall frescoes, all of which exhibit a deeply modernist yet highly individualistic and contextually specific sensibility towards form, color, and composition.

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Ink on paper

11 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches (29.2 x 29.2 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches (57.4 x 42.4 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Ink on paper

11 x 7 1/2 inches (27.9 x 19.1 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches (57.5 x 42.4 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, c. mid-late 1960

Lithograph

13 x 15 inches (33 x 38.1 cm)
Framed: 16 5/8 x 22 5/8 inches (42.3 x 57.6 cm)

“Blindness is a new feeling, a new experience, a new state of being.” —Benode Behari Mukherjee

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Lithograph

12 3/8 x 16 3/4 inches (31.5 x 42.5 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 30 5/8 inches (57.5 x 77.8 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Dancer, n.d.

Ink on paper

13 x 16 1/2 inches (33 x 41.9 cm)
Framed: 16 5/8 x 22 5/8 inches (42.3 x 57.5 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Ink on paper

14 x 10 inches (35.6 x 25.4 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches (57.5 x 42.4 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Pastel on paper

12 1/2 x 10 1/5 inches (31.8 x 25.9 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 5/8 inches (57.4 x 42.3 cm)

“Blindness did not stop him from remaining creative, it helped him to draw on his inner resources more fully,” R. Siva Kumar writes. “The contemplative and recollective aspect of his work method came to the fore. Freed from the distraction of matching the image with reality visually it became possible to focus on the inner vision and its material actualisation, an important part of the creative process that usually goes unfocused…. His late works are therefore the products of a dialogue between inner vision and outer perception.”

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Ink on paper

13 x 8 inches (33 x 20.3 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches (57.5 x 42.4 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Ink on paper

15 x 11 inches (38.1 x 27.9 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches (57.4 x 42.5 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Lithograph

9 x 9 inches (22.9 x 22.9 cm)
Framed: 16 3/4 x 22 5/8 inches (42.4 x 57.5 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Lithograph

13 x 19 inches (33 x 48.3 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 30 3/4 inches (57.5 x 78.0 cm)

Mukherjee pursued what he once called “an artist’s ultimates,” seeking to know himself, respond to his environment, and share his work with others.

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Ink on paper

12 1/2 x 8 inches (31.8 x 20.3 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches (57.4 x 42.4 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Ink on paper

11 x 7 1/2 inches (27.9 x 19.1 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches (57.5 x 42.4 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Lithograph

9 x 9 inches (22.9 x 22.9 cm)
Framed: 16 3/4 x 22 5/8 inches (42.4 x 57.5 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Lithograph

13 x 19 inches (33 x 48.3 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 30 3/4 inches (57.5 x 78.0 cm)

Mukherjee pursued what he once called “an artist’s ultimates,” seeking to know himself, respond to his environment, and share his work with others.

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Ink on paper

12 1/2 x 8 inches (31.8 x 20.3 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches (57.4 x 42.4 cm)

Benode Behari Mukherjee

Untitled, n.d.

Ink on paper

11 x 7 1/2 inches (27.9 x 19.1 cm)
Framed: 22 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches (57.5 x 42.4 cm)

Benode Behari with folded paper figures for mural, 1972. Photo by Nemai Ghosh, courtesy Mrinalini Mukherjee

Installation view of the exhibition, Benode Behari Mukherjee: After Sight, at David Zwirner in London, dated 2020.

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