Born in Pune, India in 1964, multi-genre artist Sandeep Mukherjee first pursued a career in industrial engineering. While working as an engineer at Texas Instruments, he grew inspired to make art and began taking classes at a community college before earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. Lauded for his broad repertoire, which includes painting, drawing, and large-scale installations, Mukherjee produces work that critics have dubbed "ecstatic abstraction." Fusing traditional Eastern art, modernist abstract painting, and textile art into a layered process, Mukherjee's resulting compositions vacillate between the cosmic and tangible.
Generally speaking, Mukherjee favors acrylic inks and paints on textured surfaces while drawing on personal experience and universal wisdom. Over the past two decades, Mukherjee has gone from making minimalist figurative art to abstract, organic forms with prominent surfaces and bold palettes. As a highly theoretical artist, Mukherjee creates work in conversation with Asian mysticism, Western notions of subjectivity, avant-garde experimental film, the legacy of Southern California's Light and Space movement, multi-racial social dynamics, and digital technology.
Mukherjee has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions throughout Los Angeles, including at the Margo Leavin Gallery, the Pomona College Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as abroad in India, Bangladesh, Germany, and other countries. He has been honored by the City of Los Angeles and California Community Foundation and also received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Works by Mukherjee are now part of the collections of notable institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi. Since 2006, Mukherjee has also held the position of Professor of Art at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
