«After Sight» - Benode Behari Mukherjee at the David Zwirner Gallery
«After Sight» - Benode Behari Mukherjee at the David Zwirner Gallery
by Benedict Croft
David Zwirner presents Europe’s first ever solo exhibition of Kolkata- born artist Benode Behari Mukherjee, who studied and taught at Rabindranath Tagore’s famous Kala Bhavana art school in Santiniketan, West Bengal. Mukherjee was born in 1904 with a serious eye condition that in 1956 led to his complete loss of sight, pushing him to explore new artistic fields – most notably that of collage and sculpture. It is on these later works that Zwirner’s exhibition focuses.
Inspired deeply by his own environment and Indian folk traditions, Mukherjee followed in the tradition of his Kala Bhavan mentors, allowing for the collaboration between cross-cultural modernism and indigenous styles. His loss of sight, however, freed his work further from realist constraints, allowing it to be constructed purely by his inner vision and memory. Techniques such as collage allowed Mukherjee to understand shapes and dimensions through touch, with colour being dictated purely by memory.
A collage of the two figures, constructed in 1959, displays Mukherjee’s continued desire to represent his external world, doing this through harsh yet vibrant geometric forms that are given depth through definite lines, which act as a form of counterpoint. Although some of his later works move closer to the complete abstract – with external objects defined through a multitude of singular shapes that evoke the collages of Matisse and paintings of Arp – they remain grounded in Mukherjee’s environmental reality. The collection consists of depictions of forms that are often deemed prosaic, such as cats, goats, and household objects; yet the dynamic use of colour re-energises such subjects, presenting them as no less than crucial forms. Mukherjee’s work, however, is nuanced, with these works not attempting to force a realist interpretation, but instead allowing for powerful insights into his inner vision.
It is, to some extent, difficult to enjoy Mukherjee’s charming pieces, which were once so loved by the villagers and locals of Santiniketan, in the elite setting of the David Zwirner gallery – a white-washed, high- ceilinged, Georgian townhouse in central London – where they seem to act in compete contradiction to their surroundings. Nonetheless, although they appear small, their brilliance dominates the space, bringing warmth and colour to the heart of Mayfair.
