A Story of South Asian Art review – banging sculpture marred by dreary neighbours

Royal Academy, London
Mrinalini Mukherjee’s surreal spins on Indian folk and sacred art are powerfully fascinating, but they gain nothing from works shown with them hereAs you enter the galleries you can’t avoid the slobbish giant. Maybe it is drunk or drugged as it towers and slumps, a red and brown creature with a demonic face and sagging stomach. If the cord suspending it from the ceiling snapped it would just be a pile of hemp on the floor.This monster has all the qualities that make the art of Mrinalini Mukherjee, who was born in Mumbai in 1949 and died in 2015, funny, fascinating and surreal. She created it in 1985, making it, like many of her works, with tightly woven, intensely coloured natural fibres. It is called Pakshi, meaning bird, and now I see it, the feathery flanks and floppy wings. Mukherjee’s sculpture is a hallucinatory but sharply observed response to nature, full of echoes of the Indian landscape and, in this case, India’s skies. If a bird can become an ogre in her fantastic imagination, a flower can grow into a fat, sprawling, bloodied excrescence and a tree transmute into gold. So why does the Royal Academy try to suffocate her exhilarating works in an incoherent show that surrounds them with mediocre stuff by much less interesting artists? Continue reading...

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