Preview our SPRING 2026 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
THE SHOESTRING PUBLISHER
Mrinalini Mukherjee
Edited with introduction by Shanay Jhaveri. Text by Naman Ahuja, Grant Watson, Emilia Terracciano, Deepak Ananth.
A revelatory monograph on the work of singular figure in sculpture and fiber art
This revelatory monograph explores the work of Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015). Committed to sculpture, Mukherjee worked most intensively with fiber, making significant forays into ceramic and bronze toward the middle and latter half of her career.
Within her immediate artistic milieu in post-independent India, Mukherjee was one of the outlier artists whose art remained untethered to the dominant commitments of painting and figural storytelling. Her sculpture was sustained by a knowledge of traditional Indian and historic European sculpture, folk art, modern design, local crafts and textiles. Knotting was the principal gesture of Mukherjee's technique, evident from the very start of her practice. Working intuitively, she never resorted to a sketch, model or preparatory drawing. Probing the divide between figuration and abstraction, Mukherjee would fashion unusual, mysterious, sensual and, at times, unsettlingly grotesque forms, commanding in their presence and scale.
In retrospect, Mukherjee's artistic output appears iconoclastic, singular, calling out for assessment and analysis across multiple registers, as well as for an account of why, in hindsight, it was relegated to the margins. Within these pages are deliberations on Mukherjee's place within both an Indian and a more international art history, and her work's relationship to other fiber-art practices from the mid to late 20th century. This book will introduce Mukherjee to a new generation of scholars, art historians and artists.
"Untitled," glazed ceramic (1996,) is reproduced from 'Mrinalini Mukherjee.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Artnet
Ben Davis
[Mrinalini Mukherjee's] sculptures eschewed the kinds of easily marketed images of “Indian-ness” that the global contemporary art biz sometimes feeds on. It has its own rhythms, and you can’t approach it either purely formally or purely iconographically, but have to find some other way in.
New Yorker
Andrea K. Scott
Vegetal, sexual, exquisite, and strange, the fibre sculptures of Mrinalini Mukherjee [...] are so emphatically haptic that, in their presence, you might stop thinking and just feel what you see.
4Columns
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Mukherjee’s sculptures remain hardly known in the United States... Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee does an admirable job of redressing our ignorance.
Beautifully designed layered jackets, several papers (including one that is subtly pearlescent), a wealth of archival materials and stellar new photograps are just a few of the things that we love about this stunning new 320-page monograph on Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, who died in 2015 at age 66. Published to accompany a major exhibition that opens at The Met Breuer today, this volume brings to light a relatively little-known artist of the twentieth century, whose pioneering and often humorous work can only be seen as major in the twenty-first. “Challenging the very definitions that we use to classify human identities, genders and sexes, Mukherjee’s ‘benign’ monsters make fun of our most basic categories of self-definition and boundaries dividing self from the other,” Emilia Terracciano writes. “As such, they ‘grow’ in the difficult middle ground between the oppositions dividing human from animal and animal from plant, nature from culture and one sex from the other.” Featured image is "Devi," natural and dried hemp (1982). continue to blog
This summer, Mrinalini Mukherjee arrived in our warehouse and opened at The Met Breuer simultaneously, and blew our minds. The perfect book for the perfect show. This week, Holland Cotter reviewed the exhibition for the New York Times, and we couldn't agree more. "It’s been a while since I was last truly startled by contemporary sculpture," he writes, "enough to make me wonder 'How on earth did someone even think to do this, never mind do it?' But that was my reaction to Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee at the Met Breuer… The sheer amount of energy generated by her formal inventiveness, self-developed virtuosity, pre-postmodern thinking and un-Modern emotion makes for one of the most arresting museum experiences of the season. It is an astonishment." Featured image is "Adi Pushp II" (1998–99). continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 7.75 x 10 in. / 320 pgs / 300 color / 50 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $60.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $85 GBP £53.00 ISBN: 9788190472098 PUBLISHER: The Shoestring Publisher AVAILABLE: 5/21/2019 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD Except India
Published by The Shoestring Publisher. Edited with introduction by Shanay Jhaveri. Text by Naman Ahuja, Grant Watson, Emilia Terracciano, Deepak Ananth.
A revelatory monograph on the work of singular figure in sculpture and fiber art
This revelatory monograph explores the work of Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015). Committed to sculpture, Mukherjee worked most intensively with fiber, making significant forays into ceramic and bronze toward the middle and latter half of her career.
Within her immediate artistic milieu in post-independent India, Mukherjee was one of the outlier artists whose art remained untethered to the dominant commitments of painting and figural storytelling. Her sculpture was sustained by a knowledge of traditional Indian and historic European sculpture, folk art, modern design, local crafts and textiles. Knotting was the principal gesture of Mukherjee's technique, evident from the very start of her practice. Working intuitively, she never resorted to a sketch, model or preparatory drawing. Probing the divide between figuration and abstraction, Mukherjee would fashion unusual, mysterious, sensual and, at times, unsettlingly grotesque forms, commanding in their presence and scale.
In retrospect, Mukherjee's artistic output appears iconoclastic, singular, calling out for assessment and analysis across multiple registers, as well as for an account of why, in hindsight, it was relegated to the margins. Within these pages are deliberations on Mukherjee's place within both an Indian and a more international art history, and her work's relationship to other fiber-art practices from the mid to late 20th century. This book will introduce Mukherjee to a new generation of scholars, art historians and artists.
