Leela Mukherjee Indian, 1916-2009

Born in 1916 in the Sindh province of what is now Pakistan, Leela Mukherjee trained as a painter and sculptor at Santiniketan where she met her husband, the renowned artist and pedagogue Benodebehari Mukherjee. Leela Mukherjee is among India’s early sculptors, who educated herself in the art of wood-work by receiving training that was both indigenous and eclectic from local craftsmen in Nepal, apart from her more formal years at Santiniketan. She also helped her husband with the murals he painted on campus, including the monumental 1947 wall painting at Hindi Bhavana, Medieval Indian Saints, which the critic R. Sivakumar locates ‘among the greatest achievements in contemporary Indian painting’.

Leela Mukherjee’s sculptures in wood and metal have been exhibited in several shows, including the important surveys All-India Sculpture Exhibition, 1959, and Major Trends in Indian Art, 1997. Her works are part of the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art and the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi.

Mukerjee’s work will be presented at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Hepworth Wakefield Museum, England, in 2025.

The artist died in 2003, at the age of sixty-nine.