Sandeep Mukherjee India, b. 1964

Sandeep Mukherjee was born in 1964 in Pune, India. His educational path was unusually wide-ranging: he earned a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology, Mangalore, in 1986, followed by an M.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988. He subsequently redirected his focus entirely toward fine art, completing a B.F.A. at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, in 1996, and an M.F.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1999. Since 2006, he has served as Professor of Art at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Mukherjee's practice centers on the relationship between process, affect, and image. Working with acrylic ink and alcohol on duralene, a translucent industrial film, he guides pigment across the surface using an air gun, exploiting viscosity, surface tension, and perforation to produce self-organizing, fractal-like formations. The resulting works are neither painted in any conventional sense nor entirely surrendered to chance: they record the movement of the artist's body, the pull of gravity, and the behavior of materials in real time. His modular, site-sensitive panels, as seen in the Palimpsestseries (2017) and Molting the Fractured (2017), can be reconfigured across different architectural environments, so that each installation constitutes a new spatial conversation rather than a fixed object. The work engages with process art, textile traditions, and modernist abstraction while remaining grounded in a distinctly corporeal and improvisational logic.

Mukherjee's work is held in numerous major public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the San Jose Museum of Art; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; the Colección Jumex, Mexico City; and the Microsoft Collection, Washington. Among the fellowships and awards he has received: the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2017), the Villa Aurora Berlin Fellowship, awarded jointly with 68projects of Galerie Kornfeld Berlin (2017), the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (2015-2016), and the California Community Foundation Mid-Career Artist Fellowship (2009).

Mukherjee has exhibited internationally across solo and group contexts. Solo presentations include exhibitions at Chimento Contemporary, Los Angeles; Brennan & Griffin, New York; Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles; Sister Gallery, Los Angeles; Project 88, Mumbai; 68projects by KORNFELD, Berlin; the Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont; and the Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka. Group exhibitions have taken him to the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2003); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2003); the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2016); the Sturt Haaga Gallery at Descanso Gardens, Los Angeles (2017); and the Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, among many others. His work has also been presented at VOLTA NY (2017) and at Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2016).

Sandeep Mukherjee's relationship with KORNFELD Galerie Berlin is rooted in a close institutional collaboration. In 2017, 68projects by KORNFELD co-initiated the Villa Aurora Berlin Fellowship that brought Mukherjee to Berlin for a residency, during which he completed the body of work shown in his solo exhibition Molting the Fractured at 68projects (September 9 to November 4, 2017). He also participated in the group exhibition Supper Club at KORNFELD Galerie Berlin in January 2017. In 2024, Mukherjee was included in Berlin on My Mind: Celebrating 10 Years of Artistic Residency at 68projects by KORNFELD, a milestone group exhibition bringing together all twenty-one artists who had participated in the residency program since its founding.

Mukherjee's practice continues to evolve at the intersection of material research and spatial thinking, with each new body of work extending his inquiry into how process, body, and environment generate image together.