By James Brewer
As a child, Mrinalini Mukherjee would describe flowers for her artist father, who had lost his eyesight. She dreamed of a career as a botanist, but she was to become a leading sculptor, albeit transfixed in blending the visual vocabulary of plant forms into much of her output.
Over four decades, Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949-2015) tirelessly through her artworks worked in the arenas of nature, regional traditions of architecture and craft, mythology and international Modernist art and design. In imposingly manipulated textile weave, many made in an improvised garage-studio, she fused abstraction with the human form.
At the Royal Academy of Arts in London, a group exhibition A Story of South Asian Art: Mrinalini Mukherjee and Her Circle tells her story and threads into that the constellation of people and places around her. It opens chapters from a near-century of art with a dimension of India’s contribution rarely seen in the West
Mrinalini’s childhood love of flowers and fascination with their shapes and folds were to blossom into vibrant sculptures of woven hemp. One such braiding was Adi Pushp II (“First Flower,” 1998-99) with its red and black colouring suggestive variously of psychic energy, of earth and eroticism. Like others among her creations, this might be presumed to reach out in sacred devotion.
The most glorious exhibit in the Royal Academy’s display is suspended from the ceiling. It is called Pakshi, meaning ‘bird’ in Sanskrit and other Indian languages. The tall, 255cm (more than 8ft) high purplish sculpture of knotted hemp fibre was one of a series she made in the 1980s.
The Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation relates how for a British Council show she transformed a garage in New Delhi into her studio, allowing her room to control lighting and texture and intricate surface treatments on her fibre sculptures. Production of these was clearly approaching industrial scale.
The Foundation underlines how she made the most of that workspace. “Photographs from 1985 show the garage studio filled with her towering fibre sculptures, floating mid-air as if frozen in motion. The density of hemp made these works physically demanding – some weighing close to a hundred kilos.”
Born in Bombay (which was renamed Mumbai in 1995), Mrinalini was raised in Santiniketan, West Bengal, where her parents, Leela Mukherjee and Benode Behari Mukherjee taught at the fine arts institute Kala Bhavana. Santiniketan means “abode of peace” and the institute was founded in 1919 by the poet, polymath and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.
While studying painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda (a city now known as Vadodara), Mrinalini developed her fascination with the ancient Arabic hand-knotting technique of macramé, to make innovative freestanding soft sculptures.
She branched into ceramics and then bronze, still concentrating on organic themes from modernist movements in India and beyond. In her bronze works, such as Forest Flame IV (2009), she applied superbly carved foliage and blossoms, a reminder of the motifs she loved in her youth.
She was anything but parochial. Her sculptures, watercolours and etchings summoned up an international arc from Nepalese wood carving and indigenous Mexican art and back to Indian folklore.
She built on a strong artistic legacy, reflecting notably that of her mother, Leela (1916-2002) who was regarded as India’s first modern female sculptor. Mrinalini’s work is presented “in dialogue” with her mother’s works crafted from wood.
Her father, Benode (1904–1980) was a teacher and pioneer of the Contextual Modernism movement in India, which encouraged the embrace of humanism and cross-culturalism with local traditions. Benode is represented by among other achievements a group of collages made after he lost his sight in his early 50s.
Featuring 100 works, the exhibition makes clear how Mrinalini’s close relationships, shared learning, and mutual support with a creative and intellectual network influenced the course of modern and contemporary art in the sub-continent. Key personalities include KG Subramanyan, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Nilima Sheikh and Jagdish Swaminathan.
Subramanyan (1924–2016), an educator and prolific artist who taught Mrinalini and others who came to eminence, is represented by paintings, terracotta reliefs, works on paper and rare textile fragments. Championing craft including textiles such as jute as a living art form amid a rapidly modernising order, he at the same time experimented with Cubism and abstraction. His pupils included Gulammohammed Sheikh and Nilima Sheikh.
Gulammohammed Sheikh, aged 88, was one of Mrinalini’s teachers at Baroda. He and his wife, fellow artist Nilima Sheikh, formed lifelong friendships with her. He has experimented with pop art and collage, Indian miniatures, and blending medieval and Renaissance painting with political commentary and storytelling.
On show are Gulammohammed;s acrylic panels Hunted and Simurgh and the Paris, from 2019-24. The Simurgh, which is believed to have first appeared in Iranian mythology, has flown across Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Greek-Roman, Turkish and Slavic mythologies and in the Avesta, the Zoroastrian holy book.
Nilima Sheikh (born 1945) was inspired by traditional miniature painting, folk songs and oral storytelling. Her paintings frequently incorporate poetry and address the experiences of women and of peripheral communities and regions in India. Four sources of her painted scroll series SongSpace are reunited here for the first time since she conceived the work 30 years ago.
Jagdish Swaminathan (1928–1994), a close friend and Mrinalini’s spiritual mentor stood out against measuring Indian art by European modernist standards. He turned to tribal and folk visual traditions: an example is his brightly coloured canvas Untitled (Lily by my Window), from the early 1970s, in which a bird and a stone hover above the flower.
Proud of its legacy as one of the oldest art schools in Europe, the Royal Academy highlights the importance of the two visionary educational institutions – the Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, and the Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda – which nurtured Mrinalini.
Mrinalini died at the age of 65 soon after her first retrospective at New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art was launched. The Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation’s archive houses an impressive collection of over 2,380 items documenting Mrinalini’s pioneering career.
Bring a strong pair of reading glasses to the current show, as the wall captions are in tiny print on dark background, under subdued lighting
The exhibition is organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, in partnership with the Hepworth Wakefield. It is curated by Tarini Malik, curator at the Royal Academy, with Rebecca Bray, assistant curator at the Academy. Curatorial research for the exhibition was made possible with Art Fund support.
From May 23 to November 1, 2026, a major retrospective of Mrinalini Mukherjee will be presented at the Hepworth, an institution that opened in May 2011 and was named after Barbara Hepworth, a leading artist of the 20th century who was born and brought up in Wakefield.
Image captions:
Mrinalini Mukherjee and works in progress at her garage studio. New Friends Colony, New Delhi, c.1985. Courtesy of Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation and Asia Art Archive. Photo: Ranjit Singh.
Pakshi (Bird, 1985), dyed fibre, in foreground. By Mrinalini Mukherjee. Exhibition view.
Adi Pushp II (First Flower), 1998-99. Hemp. By Mrinalini Mukherjee. Private collection. Exhibition view.
Forest Flame IV, 2009. Bronze. By Mrinalini Mukherjee. Taimur Hassan Collection. Photo: Humayun Memon. Courtesy of Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation.
Hunted (on left) and Simurgh and the Paris, 2019-24, acrylic on board. By Gulammohammed Sheikh. Taimur Hassan Collection. © Gulammohammed Sheikh.
Lady with Fruit, 1957. Paper and graphite on paper. By Benode Behari Mukherjee. Tate: Purchased with funds provided by the South Asia Acquisitions Committee, 2015. Photo: © Tate. Courtesy of Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation.
Nilima Sheikh, Home-Land 2, 2024. Mixed tempera on Sanganer paper. Sunita & Vijay Choaria. © The artist.
Untitled (Lily by my Window), c. early 1970s. Oil on canvas. By Jagdish Swaminathan. Private collection, Switzerland. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. © 2025. © J Swaminathan Foundation.
A Story of South Asian Art: Mrinalini Mukherjee and Her Circle is at the Jillian and Arthur M Sackler Wing of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until February 24, 2026.
