A contemporary artist as well as a Pomona College art professor, Sandeep Mukherjee has ventured into the realm of public art, with his work on view in prominent locations.
His latest installation bursts from the corner of a staircase in the new YouTube Theater at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, home to the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams and Chargers.
The wall-mounted work, Suddenly Everywhere, 2021, seems to erupt “like a gathering of the earth and the sky moving everywhere,” the artist says.
Mukherjee still creates paintings and sculptures that are displayed in galleries, museums or private spaces. But his career in public art has taken flight. He already has been selected for large-scale permanent works at the Facebook offices in Los Angeles, a federal courthouse in Toledo, Ohio, and now the 6,000-seat YouTube Theater tucked beneath the roof of SoFi Stadium.
With a master’s degree in industrial engineering from UC Berkeley and a master of fine arts from UCLA, Mukherjee brings a scientific understanding of such concepts as movement, malleability and color to his work. He created the 204 pieces of hand-molded aluminum on the walls of the theater’s lobby by wrapping the pliable metal around sections of tree trunks, cross-sections of trees, broken limbs and even rocks. Then he painted the molded shapes in gradients of intensely colored acrylic—oranges that look hot to the touch, blood reds and varied hues of goldenrod, lizard green, indigo and amethyst that merge into each other. Seen together, the pieces sometimes almost look like microorganisms on a slide. Viewed separately, they resemble archeological finds—bones, stone tools, even pieces of bodies.
Read the entire article here: https://www.pomona.edu/news/2021/09/16-prof-sandeep-mukherjees-art-graces-youtube-theater