A major retrospective at The Hepworth Wakefield will celebrate the work of Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015), one of the most significant modernist sculptors of the 20th century.
Mukherjee will be presented in the context of key works by pioneering women artists from the early generation of modern Indian and Bangladeshi sculpture – the artist’s mother, Leela Mukherjee (1916 – 2002), Meera Mukherjee (1923 – 1998), Novera Ahmed (1939 – 2015) and Pilloo Pochkhanawala (1923 – 1986). Bringing these artists in dialogue for the first time in the UK, the exhibition will foreground an interwoven history of South Asian art that has long been underrepresented within Western accounts of global modernisms.
On display will be the wide range of media explored by Mrinalini Mukherjee across a remarkable 40-year career, including her monumental fibre works – such as Nag Devta (1979) and Aspara (1985), one of her mid-career masterpieces – ceramic and bronze sculptures, drawings, etchings and watercolours. Mukherjee’s work fused abstraction with sensuous figuration, drawing on nature, ancient sculptural techniques, modernist experimentation and Indian craft and textile traditions.
The exhibition will situate Mrinalini Mukherjee’s work within a broader lineage of radical women artists who worked in the decades following independence across India and Bangladesh and who reshaped modern sculpture in South Asia. It will will chart the story of their artistic development and evolution and highlight the impact of these eminent South Asian women sculptors and their vital contributions to the development of international sculpture. Although only Leela Mukherjee and Mrinalini Mukherjee shared a lived, intergenerational dialogue, the exhibition will trace affinities that extend beyond biography – connections forged through parallel acts of reinvention during a period of profound artistic change across the subcontinent. Working with fibre, wood, bronze, cement and industrial materials, these artists expanded the possibilities of sculpture through experimentation with material and process. Drawing from both pedagogical and vernacular traditions of making across South Asia – weaving, carving, casting and reuse – their works reveal a shared pursuit of unbound sculptural forms that unsettle the hierarchies separating art from craft.
Groupings of Leela Mukherjee’s bronzes, carved wooden sculptures and watercolours will reveal the diversity of her influences across traditional folklore and indigenous Indian and Nepalese woodworking. A selection of bronze sculptures by Meera Mukherjee draw on the Dhokra craft techniques of indigenous craftspeople in central and eastern India, and explore themes of labour, spirituality, community, kinship and ordinary daily life. Meera Mukherjee’s textile works will demonstrate how weaving informed her sculptural language, translating the logic of thread and binding into metal.
at The Hepworth Wakefield
until Novemeber 1, 2026
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