Women Artists: from the collection of National Gallery of Modern Art

Meera Mukherjee, one of  the most outstanding Indian
Sculptor to emerge in the post-Independence period, produced works of
considerable power. A heroic individualist, she denied any feminist content in
her work, considering herself to be a professional first and a woman second.
Mukherjee had her first lessons in sculpture from a traditional sculptor,
gaining further technical training later in Munich. On returning to India she
renounced her western training in favour of traditional art, Mukherjee used the circ perdu or the lost wax process for her sculptures. Deeply influenced by the Dhokra sculptors of Bastar in Madhya Pradesh, Mukherjee perfected a technique in bronze that was completely her own. Similarly, she evolved an iconography that was unique. Opposing pulls of mass and movement, strength and vulnerability give an intense character to her figures enhanced by the textural play created by the use of decorative elements on the surface experience that included an anthropological study of the Bastar crafts: ‘To my mind, every artist must also be an artisan, who brings to his work a devotion

Hailing from Punjab and having studied at Baroda
followed by higher education at Kent, USA, Ms Harbhajan Sandhu had a firm
foundation in art. Ms Sandhu was not contented with just one medium and
experimented with different media – bronze, cement and stone, easily slipping
from one to another, testing their inherent qualities and creating different
forms with them. 

Latika Katt experiments in a multidimensional way; on the one hand she prefers to capture typical characters in her portrait sculptures; on the one hand she releases energies by movement of material in pure abstract kinetic forms. She displays a world of dream in a conscious distortion. The Plane at which Latika meets the materials is clearly characterized by a surrealist strain, especially in the way her teasing of the material yields form. 

Pushpmala N showed her promise in the representation of human and animal forms, through terracotta. Her treatment is soft and very intimately handled. There is an overwhelming descriptive realism and representation of detail in her attempts.  Starting off her career as a sculptor, Pushpamala began using
photography and video in the mid -1990s, creating tableaux and photo-romances
in which she casts herself in various roles. She is known for her strongly feminist work and for her rejection of authenticity and embracing of multiple realities. As one of the pioneers of conceptual art in India and a leading figure in the feminist experiments in subject, material and language, her inventive work in sculpture, conceptual photography, video and performance have had a deep influence on art practice in India.

 A
brilliant sculptor of the post 1980’s generation, Mrinalini Mukherjee is the
daughter of Binode Bihari Mukherjee and a student of K.G. Subramanyan at
Baroda. She offers a subtle but complex feminist message through the medium of
an unconventional material, a species of vegetable fibre resembling hemp.
Mrinalini fully exploits the dynamics of the material, its capacity to fold,
twist, drape and stretch. She begins by dying the material in deep colours,
such as purple or carmine, and then knots and weaves it. She then slowly builds
up her totemic figures, some of them menacing, many of them sexually ambiguous,
occasionally a flower symbolizing the genitals.  

A painter, sculptor, installation artist and
filmmaker inspired by Marxist ideologies, Navjot consciously questions various
frameworks of social commitment. Born in Meerut, she has travelled extensively
across continents in her quest for empowering people, whether in art or in the
different issues she has addressed as a writer and filmmaker . In the Seventies,
she was also associated with the Progressive Youth Movement. Navjot maps the
trajectories of memory, history and culture, interrogating ‘body politics’,
seeing the self as a source of knowledge. I her work She articulates her own experience to
address issues related to the social, the political and the artistic. Her
interaction and experimental works with traditional artists from Bastar, a
tribal community from Madhya Pradesh, lasted over two decades. 

Wood carving has been a special interest of Leela Mukherjee. She evidently chiselled prototype aboriginal human forms with great confidence. Dark polished surface also adds intensity in its archaic behavior. 

During her lifetime Pochkhanwala, proved her competence both as a technician and visualizer. She was of the strong opinion that "art can exist without a subject to portray", however maintained that  "form and emotion are interlinked. The moment a form is consciously created, it has an emotional content, even when it depicts the negation of emotion"  For Pochkhanawala, every new material was a challenge to be confronted and
phrased into the often archetypal or literary images that fascinated her,
whether abstracted figures, cloud forms, masks or weathered architecture. She
would work with aluminium, steel, wood, and stone of various kinds, producing
works on a scale from the intimate maquette to the monumental public sculpture.