Mrinalini Mukherjee

This major retrospective at The Hepworth Wakefield will celebrate Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949 – 2015), one of the world’s most significant modernist sculptors. The exhibition will bring together – for the first time in the UK – the full range of different media Mukherjee worked with, including textiles, ceramic and bronze sculptures, drawings, etchings and watercolours, celebrating an extraordinary 40-year career.

Mukherjee worked intensively with fibre, and later bronze and ceramic, creating an extensive body of work that fused abstraction and figuration with influences from nature, ancient sculptural techniques, modern design, and Indian craft and textile traditions. As a student, Mukherjee began to experiment intuitively with the ancient Arabic hand-knotting practice known as macramé, creating monumentally-scaled freestanding soft sculptures that possess an embodied presence. When she later turned to ceramic and bronze, she followed a similarly intuitive process, leading to works of an organic nature that also draw from modernist movements in India and beyond.

The exhibition is prefigured by a group show centred around Mukherjee at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in autumn 2025. The Hepworth Wakefield is working in partnership with the RA to bring this exceptional artist to audiences in London and Wakefield.