Vadehra Art Gallery presents Through Wakefulness, A Night Rising, a solo exhibition featuring works from the legendary artist and pedagogue Benodebihari Mukherjee.
Over his decades-long career, Mukherjee travelled out of Bengal to Nepal, Mussoorie, Bihar as well as the Far East, carrying forward from his travels a cultural cross-pollination of sorts in the paintings, drawings, scrolls, murals and later collages that he prolifically produced. A significant aspect of Indian art historical modernism is the dedication artists expressed towards discovering, refining and evolving a unique visual language that would more or less stay consistent over their oeuvres. Mukherjee’s declining vision poised him to see the world differently than his contemporaries.
Through Wakefulness, A Night Rising presents a special body of work (from the early 1920s to the late 1950s) from across Mukherjee’s travels and interests, including landscapes, figurations, flower studies, wood-cuts self-portraits as well as some post-blindness collages and compositions that create a memorable discourse around how vision appeared to him.