The Paradoxes of Sandeep Mukherjee

Mukherjee’s commitment to these sorts of existential questions — the relationship of presence to absence, the archetypal to the ineffable, energy to matter — and perhaps his Indian ethnicity have led many to attribute a spiritual dimension to the work. While he doesn’t discount this reading, he is ambivalent about the presumptions on which it’s based. “I don’t understand what people mean when they say spiritual,” he says. “I’m still struggling with that one. I think for me, spiritual — if there’s an idea, I would say that it has to do with space and time and one’s place in those two or three areas. It’s very much for me about what’s in the present, what’s in front of you, but it’s also about that which you cannot talk about. It’s very material, it’s very much about physicality, it’s about the senses, but it’s also about something that’s slipping away, that’s very mutable, that’s very imperceptible — how do those paradoxes co-exist in this way? So I guess for me that would be spiritual: It’s about constantly trying to be in that gap.”

Over the course of our conversation, Mukherjee speaks as avidly about the principles of physics and cosmology as he does about Hindu mythological paintings and the Buddhist cave temples of India. After mentioning the feverishly gestural Van Gogh, he leaps to the famously cerebral Sol LeWitt, who viewed the physical fabrication of an artwork as “a perfunctory affair.” Mukherjee’s capacity for straddling such divergent themes can be exhausting, it seems. At one point, after discussing the conflict between his admiration for LeWitt’s schematic approach and his dissatisfaction with the results that such an approach produces in his own work — “I’m not interested in having an algorithm on the wall,” as he puts it — he collapses back in his chair with a sigh, saying, “I guess it’s just the struggle of being the kind of artist I am; I don’t know that it’s going to go away.”

Untitled (2008)

Untitled (2008)

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More About

• Sandeep Mukherjee
• University of California-Los Angeles
• Sol LeWitt
• Pomona
• Claremont

The power of the work itself, however, comes as a reminder that nothing is as far removed from its opposite as it would seem: One loop of the spiral is necessarily bound to every other, the mass of the mountain inextricably entwined with the space of its valley.