Art Professor Sandeep Mukherjee shows his work at Frieze Art Fair, NYC

Sandeep Mukherjee, a Painting Professor at Pomona College, will be having his artwork featured in the Frieze Art Fair in New York for the second time since 2016. This will be his third time participating in the this fair overall counting his 2015 exhibition in London’s annual Frieze Art Fair. Established in 1991, this contemporary art fair is dedicated to showcasing “art from ancient to modern,” as stated from its website. This year, Mukherjee has said he will be exhibiting “a series of works [from] 2013-14 that approach surface as palimpsest and explore the residue between layers.”

Among the experimental paintings within this series, Mukherjee will be showing a piece called Untitled (Tear 1), made from acrylic ink on duralene. It contains an assortment of textures and neutral tones that display the repetitive and deliberate motions of continuously layering paint. He describes the process as “physical and rhythmic gestures of the hand as the body walks, sits, crawls and slides over the surface creating an array of visual textures.” He then removes certain areas of the paint layers in order to, he says, “creat[e] new interstices so that these erasures tear and fuse the space while simultaneously confounding the experience of it.” Through this method of accumulation and subtraction, Mukherjee creates an incredible archive of painted movement that reflects the process of becoming.