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London has already welcomed one blockbuster exhibition of Indian art this year, courtesy of the British Museum, which even inspired the theme of its inaugural ball. Wealthy investors from India are truly having a huge impact on the art scene here, and now the Royal Academy is training a more contemporary lens on work from the subcontinent. A Story of South Asian Art: Mrinalini Mukherjee and Her Circle, curated by Tarini Malik, brings together works from India’s 20th-century modernist movement with great effect.
Mukherjee herself was a sculptor born in Mumbai in 1949, with a career spanning four decades (she died in 2015) and who was best known for her towering works in hemp and clay. Malik has chosen to place these pieces in the round, encircled by works from the artists who Mukherjee surrounded herself with at various schools. This is a fascinating experience which rewards your attention to all the artists.
But Mukherjee is the draw, obviously. Her vast macramé pieces, along with her bronze and clay works, look incredible in the earthy pink tones of the exhibition. As the captions so politely explain, no, your eyes are not mistaken about the genitalia on display here. As in Jauba (2000), these are giant vulvas and clitoral hoods, hand-knotted out of thick hemp fibre and hung to resemble giant lilies and flaccid male members. Without supports they would sag, but suspended they rear up in god-like forms.
Her ceramic works, with euphemistic names such as Burgeoning Cluster (c 1997) and Night Bloom (1999/2000), revel in the uncanny, with more human genitalia sprouting from leaves and flowers. Natural forms shift between human and plant the longer you stare at them.
Then there are the pair of Snake Columns (1995-96), stoneware architectural features, one of which resembles a phallus, with a hooded cobra erect and hissing at the tip. Sperm-like wiggly serpents are carved into the sides. At once reverential and confronting, this is the semi-divine serpent displayed as central to Indian religion and mythology and very different from portrayals in the Western canon.
Mukherjee’s work is a Rorschach test, then, for the British art critic. Can you see the celebration of fecund tropical forms and spiritual traditions that are unafraid of nudity, even if you were raised on daises and demure Church of England iconography? Or are you going to see a bunch of dicks and vulvas sprouting in alien botany and get all embarrassed and freaked out about it.
Her work is so magnetic that it could overwhelm the smaller pieces from her contemporaries that line the wall, but art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and artists learn from each other. There is an interesting tension in how these collectives of Indian creatives were clearly fascinated by the modernist movement in the West but also determined to forge their own artistic language after freedom from British colonial rule. Can the master’s house ever be destroyed with his own toolkit, and all that?
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As A Story of South Asian Art illustrates, Mukherjee learned to collapse the hierarchies between fine art (seen as masculine, Western, concerned with profit and assumed to hold value like gold) and craft (dismissed feminine, Other, useful, not something you can shove in a vault and see appreciate in value) from painter, muralist, printmaker and designer, KG Subramanyan.
Mukherjee studied under him at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao, which was founded after partition and became a hub of postcolonial artistic experimentation. It was Subramanyan, whose collaborations with weavers working to revitalise the craft are on display here, that encouraged Mukherjee to experiment with textiles.
Working in mediums such as hemp is exceedingly hard on the hands and body. It’s astounding, then, that in her downtime during a fellowship at Garhi Studios in Delhi in the 1980s, Mukherjee wasn’t just recovering but learning an entirely new art form from her colleagues: etching. This crossflow of skills, knowledge and ideas is beautifully illustrated by Malik’s careful curation.
Good exhibition design is always a delight, and Malik clearly drew on India’s wealth of modernist architecture for inspiration. Sculptures are arranged on circular plinths in different hues of earthy reds, complimented by the wash of plaster pink coating the gallery walls. It ties the rooms into one cohesive loop, underscoring the theme of the exhibition without being overly literal as you journey through the movement. This is not an exhibition that will get you Instagram moments, thank the gods. It’s one to savour with your eyes and your brain.
A Story of South Asian Art: Mrinalini Mukherjee and Her Circle at the Royal Academy, until February 24 2026, royalacademy.org.uk
