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“As the fires keep burning, for the 10 or 12 hours that a piece is being fired, I am alert and trying to keep it alive. Sculpture thus becomes a complete, total process. It is like nurturing and nourishing, like making a human being and bringing him to life.” - MEERA MUKHERJEE

Meera Mukherjee’s sculptural forms reflect her deep reverence for her roots, tradition, and history. Significantly interested in traditional sculpting... “As the fires keep burning, for the 10 or 12 hours that a piece is being fired, I am alert and trying to keep it alive. Sculpture thus becomes a complete, total process. It is like nurturing and nourishing, like making a human being and bringing him to life.” - MEERA MUKHERJEE

Meera Mukherjee’s sculptural forms reflect her deep reverence for her roots, tradition, and history. Significantly interested in traditional sculpting traditions, Mukherjee travelled across India in the 1960s and ‘70s, learning about metal working techniques while also compiling reports for her book, Metal Craftsmen of India. During this time, she apprenticed with Bastar sculptors in Madhya Pradesh - an experience that profoundly inspired her. She learned the lost wax or cire perdue method of bronze sculpting employed by them, locally known as Dhokra and said to be in practice in the area for over 4,500 years. While she had encountered the technique in Munich as well, she was particularly moved by the Bastar sculptors’ deep spiritual connection with their process. She sought to incorporate these learnings, and recontextualise the method for a contemporary setting.

“Working with these great craftsmen I could sense the excitement I felt thinking that here the same hands and fingers were at work that had crafted those great Tanjore bronze figures and that with them I was part of it. I experienced their complete devotion whilst working on sacred pictures which would be venerated and worshipped and I asked myself, could we modern artists not develop the same spirit of devotion and apply it to our work? Why cannot we experience the same spiritual devotion on creating a figure that is not any more a depiction of a deity but of other worldly matters?” (Artist quoted in Dr. George Lechner, Remembering Meera Mukherjee, Bernried: Buchheim Museum, 2012) Mukherjee eventually invented her own sculpting process, first creating her work in wax, then building it up and adding surface decoration using wax strips and rolls.

Mukherjee’s sculptures primarily depict scenes from rural life, often of labourers, artisans, and craftspeople engaged in daily work. Her figures are “mostly in a swinging and dancing mood, pleasantly animated or entranced, but in any case fatalistic... She often envelopes the figures into ornamental structures thus giving the impression that the people are part of a greater whole and that their existence is defined by causality and higher order.” (Dr. Clelia Segieth, Remembering Meera Mukherjee, p. 7)

Her works “are qualified by the essence of spontaneity, by their rootedness in life and a direct engagement with the same. From her own recollections it becomes evident that this has been a nearly silent and imperceptible process where she picked up the art-life interconnection from the otherwise apparently mundane rhythm of daily existence - for instance, although executing the alpana was an ordinary household affair for a Purba Bangla (East Bengal) family, Meera’s observation of her mother making it helped her pick up from all the characteristic essence of creative expression that it had... She also recalled that though her mother’s alpana was not exactly identical to the iconic alpana forms and patterned rhythms evolved and practiced in Santiniketan, and were not meant to echo them either, the designs were guided by the essential prerequisite of spontaneity and effortlessness. It is this inherent quality that she cherished...maturing from childhood into adult life, effortless spontaneity continued as an internalized philosophy of life and creative expression.” (Dr. Geeti Sen ed., Meera Mukherjee: Purity of Vision, Kolkata: Akar Prakar, 2018, p. 13)

The present lot, Balance, is a monumental four-sided sculpture composed of cast bronze panels in bas relief. Among the largest of Mukherjee’s non-public sculptures, the two main sides are made of smaller sections joined together. One side shows a man seated cross-legged, holding a weighing scale, or balance. On the opposing side, two women are seen walking amid foliage, balancing pots on their heads, a rural scene Mukherjee would have seen often during her extensive travels across India.

Mukherjee captures a multi-layered juxtaposition between female and male, prakriti and purusha, nature and justice or rationality, as addressed in the title of the present lot. An artist committed to social causes and her own cultural and artistic roots, Mukherjee offers a multitude of nuanced interpretations to the notion of “balance” as an intellectual ideal here. This notion is often evident in Mukherjee’s depictions of gendered labour, where “the domestic and the commonplace do get elevated in significance, but in her quiet though rhythmic language they do not become declamatory statements; on the contrary, they make us ponder on the dignity of labour - even more so when it is performed by women.” (Sen ed., p. 16)

The present lot was created using bronze which was Mukherjee’s favoured medium. Clay and ceramic served as alternate options should the first ever be unavailable. These preferences point to how her “world of sculptural forms constituted the mode of building up tactile, fluid, modelled volumes, rather than the subtractive mode of cutting away from a block of stone or wood to reveal the form trapped within.” (Sen ed., p. 12) This is in line with the “organic quality in the formal characteristics of her sculptures - and one is not speaking in a constricted notion about the organic visible in the forms of their constituent parts, but an overall sense of organic ‘breath’ or rhythm that informs the whole of a sculptural construction - one could think of this along the lines of the Chinese qi, the Vedantic prana or the Tibentan lung, all of which are references to the essential life-force within - all of the inner pulse that animates what we see as the outer forms.” (Sen ed., p. 12)

Balance is an ambitious work for Mukherjee, who is best known for much smaller scenes of rural life. Here, Mukherjee finds the perfect balance between the delicacy of her fine sculpting technique and the weightiness of large, cast bronze panels. Her sculptures, whether smaller, fine filigree rural scenes, Baul singers, or large public sculptures, all have a common humanism. As seen in the present lot, she offers realistic scenes of the dignity of human endeavour to evoke a higher meaning to our existence.

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