Ranu Mukherjee

Lot #51
Vitals 2, 2021
Pigment, ink and milk paint on paper
22 x 30 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco

About the Artwork

Ranu Mukherjee makes hybrid work in painting, moving image, and installation, inspired by histories of collage, speculative fiction, and Indian mythological prints. Vitals 2 is from a suite of drawings made during the Covid-19 pandemic; images are traced from news media and overlaid to form an entanglement. Mukherjee began making these “shadowtime” drawings in 2015, in the lead-up to the 2016 US Presidential election. This form of documentary practice is intended to metabolize current events while asking questions about legibility and visibility. “Shadowtime” is a word the artist created with the Bureau of Linguistical Reality in 2015, defined as “a feeling of living in two distinctly different temporal scales simultaneously, or an acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present.” Mukherjee has produced commissioned projects for the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the 2019 Karachi Biennale, among others. She is a founding member of 0rphan Drift, a collective avatar that emerged in London in 1994. Her recent honors include a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, a Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center, and a residency award at the 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles.

Retail Value: $4,000