Important Notice

A practicing sculptor, cultural anthropologist, musician, writer, illustrator and social worker, Meera Mukherjee was able to simultaneously convey abstract spirituality, musicality or rhythm, the strife of contemporary urban existence, and the simple wonderment of a child in her bronze sculptures. "My work documents the life of the common people - fishermen, weavers, women stitching kantha, commuters in a crowded bus, labourers laying cables,... A practicing sculptor, cultural anthropologist, musician, writer, illustrator and social worker, Meera Mukherjee was able to simultaneously convey abstract spirituality, musicality or rhythm, the strife of contemporary urban existence, and the simple wonderment of a child in her bronze sculptures. "My work documents the life of the common people - fishermen, weavers, women stitching kantha, commuters in a crowded bus, labourers laying cables, carrying earth. The sculptures also relate to music, dance. I work on two basic principles. One is celebration of humanism and two, a yearning for reaching beyond the quotidian and rejoicing in freedom and liberation" (as quoted in The Margi and the Desi: Between Tradition and Modernity, Gallery Espace exhibition catalogue, 2004, p. 44).

Describing her sculptures as having "reinscribed the 'folk' within the parameters of the 'modern'" Tapati Guha-Thakurta notes that although the artist has been exhibiting since she was a student, it was the "…years she spent in close observation and participation in folk art methods which would be the most influential and formative for her work. They laid at her disposal a fund of images, conventions, and techniques, which she could embellish with her own expertise and imagination. In her hands, a recognizably folk idiom, one she had closely internalized, was transformed into a sculptural style that bore her inimitable stamp. Similar techniques of preparing moulds and casts, similar ridged and embossed patterns were made to produce a range and type of sculptures whose pedigree was clearly individualist, modern, and urbane" ("Meera Mukherjee: Recasting the Folk Form", Expressions and Evocations: Contemporary Women Artists of India, Marg Publications, Mumbai, 1996, p. 51).

In the present lot, the artist creates a complex yet delicate bronze spiral of figures and ropes, transforming the urban, labour intensive job of cable-laying into a wondrous and rhythmic act. Here, Mukherjee elevates her subjects from common labourers to a joyous collective, bestowing them with a fluidity that is characteristic of her figuration, and that belies the tough metal medium she works with.

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