CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/4/2019

Amazing 'Mrinalini Mukherjee' opens at The Met Breuer

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).