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until 04.11. | #1516ARTatBerlin | 68projects shows from 9th September 2017 the exhibition “Molting the Fractured” by the artist Sandeep Mukherjee.
The exhibition Molting the Fractured is based on ideas and notions Sandeep Mukherjee has been working on for ten years. The work, which is currently in progress, will be finished this summer, during the artist’s residency in Berlin, initiated by 68projects and the Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e.V. The work, spread over all three rooms of the gallery, will have its world premiere in Berlin.
For over a decade, Sandeep Mukherjee’s work has been exploring the concept of abstracting as a means to image, carve or slice a particular aspect of flowing matter. The artist’s work in painting, drawing and installation is process-oriented and improvisational. Following multiple paths of inquiry, such as translating the performing body, subtracting the material body and folding the architectural body, the work continues to explore the relationship between process, affect and image.
As a basis material for the exhibition, Sandeep Mukherjee uses his own car, a 2006 BMW Mini Cooper hatch back he has been driving for six years and considers an extended second skin. Los Angeles is the city of cars, par excellence, with its famously intricate grid of highways and freeways, suffused with echoes of countless Hollywood movies that celebrate the car as an integral part of the American Way of Life. “The Mini Cooper performs as an enlarged body sac that becomes my frame of reference with enhanced capacities for speed, agility and movement in space. It allows me to image space, distance and topography in ways that my own body cannot”, says the artist.
With a father, who lived in Germany for many years, working for Siemens, Sandeep Mukherjee not only has a very good knowledge of the German language, but is also familiar with the German passion for car culture. In this respect, the completion of Sandeep Mukherjee’s project in Berlin is a return to his roots.
The work – a combination of sculpture, painting and installation – marks a decisive step in Sandeep Mukherjee’s artistic research and is the culmination of a complex process, during which the car, as an epidermic envelope, will be turned into a mould. It will be gridded off using 18 square sheets of industrial grade aluminium foil that will cover it completely. The individual sheets, 100 x 120 cm in size, are conceived as pieces of skin, and will be hand pressed or rubbed into relief dimensions, much like frottage. The sculpted surfaces will be painted with acrylic paint from spray bottles. The painting action mimics mist or rain as it erupts from the spray bottle projectile and falls onto the moulded surfaces. Gravity not only determines how the paint lands on the folded surfaces, but also how it moves across them. The resulting images – or unfolding patterns – are caused by the interactions between the sculptural topography and the moving paint – a constantly changing topology.
As the surfaces are rearranged in space through the process of painting, the effects of gravity will change the unfolding patterns as they are recorded successively on the surface. This process of layering is continued on both sides of the moulded form until the surface is transformed from its aluminium origins. The exterior of the moulded form will be painted in black and white, while the inside surface, which we normally do not see, will be covered in fleshy tones, to create a slice of folded flesh and complete the translation from the material to the organic.
The 18 moulded sheets will be suspended from the ceilings of all three rooms of the gallery space using transparent wire and placed in close proximity to create the impression of one continuous surface. The suspended work will be installed in such a way that viewers can move around and touch it, causing the various sculptural components to move and come into contact with each other, adding a sonic dimension. The various sense impressions – sight, touch and sound – are designed to recreate the experience of riding in a car.
Sandeep Mukherjee has had solo shows in galleries in the USA, in Asia and in Europe and has been shown worldwide in museums like the MOCA (Los Angeles), the MOMA (New York), the LACMA and the Hammer Museum (both Los Angeles), the Broad Center, Pitzker College and the Pomona College Museum of Art (both Claremont) as well as the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (New-Delhi) and the collection Jumex in Mexiko-City. Recently he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Sandeep Mukherjee is Berlin Fellow of the Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e.V. in 2017.
Vernissage: Saturday, 9th September 2017, 6 to 9 p.m.
Artist Talk: Thursday, 14th September 2017, 7 p.m. Dr. Jeni Fulton Art Historian and Editor in Chief, Sleek Magazine in conversation with Sandeep Mukherjee about his Berlin project. Free entrance. For registration please contact us at berlin@68projects.com or +49 30 889 225 890.
Exhibition period: Saturday, 9th September to Saturday, 4th November 2017
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Image captions: via 68projects, Sandeep Mukherjee
Exhibition: Sandeep Mukherjee – Molting the Fractured – 68projects | Contemporary Art – Kunst in Berlin – ART at Berlin
