Mrinalini Mukherjee: Unbound Forms - Women sculptors of India and Bangladesh
23 May – 1 November 2026
FREE for Members, Wakefield District residents and under 18s
Coming soonA 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, 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 Hepworth Wakefield is working in partnership with the The Royal Academy of Arts to bring these exceptional artists to audiences in Wakefield.
‘Mrinalini Mukherjee’s extraordinary artistic practice is the organising principle of the show, but its deeper ambition is to illuminate the matrilineages that have long underpinned modern sculpture in South Asia. These artists are bound by intellectual kinship, shared pedagogies, and a commitment to material experimentation. Seen together, their work reveals a sculptural history built through dialogue, inheritance and reinvention – one that demands a rethinking of how modernism itself is understood.’ Tarini Malik, exhibition co-curator
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Exhibition supported by
Major Supporters
Seher & Taimur Hassan
Exhibition Supporters
E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation
Exhibition Circle
Jhaveri Contemporary
Poonji Nath
Saffronart Foundation
Tarun Khanna
Vadehra Art Gallery
Publication Supporter
