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.

This exhibition will mark Lewis Hammond’s (b. 1987, Wolverhampton) first museum presentation in the UK, featuring a new body of paintings developed specifically for The Hepworth Wakefield. A graduate of the Royal Academy School in 2017, Hammond’s practice reflects a fascination with the materiality of oil paint and the evocative power of dark, earthy tones. His charged, fantastical paintings interweave mythological elements with contemporary themes and explore the interplay between personal relationships and global socio-political events. Drawing inspiration from Old Masters like Caravaggio, Velåzquez, and Goya, he creates haunting, statuesque figures that traverse boundaries between the individual and the archetypal. At The Hepworth Wakefield, Hammond will explore the theme of home and what defines a place of belonging. He examines how various states of existence can strip us of this sense, leaving us to confront the dislocation and alienation that arise from being without a place to call home. Hammond’s paintings will serve as love letters to both notions of home and to those who are without one. As an artist who has spent several years based in Berlin – and is now returning to the UK to establish his studio – this exhibition serves as both a homecoming and a reflection on themes of disconnection and ways of coming together.

The Hepworth Family Gift consists of 44 full size, rarely seen working models – surviving prototypes in plaster and aluminium made in preparation for the works in bronze Hepworth executed from the mid-1950s to the end of her career. It also includes drawings and a large group of lithographs and screen prints by Barbara Hepworth, and has been given to The Hepworth Wakefield, via the Art Fund, by the artist’s daughters Rachel Kidd and Sarah Bowness, through the Trustees of the Barbara Hepworth Estate. The Hepworth at Work display explores Hepworth’s studio environment, her work in plaster, her collaborative relationships with bronze foundries and the monumental commissions she received in the last fifteen years of her life. The tools and materials on display were Hepworth’s own and have been drawn from her second studio in St Ives, the Palais de Danse. Also featured is a step-by-step reconstruction of the bronze-casting process, photographs of works in progress and four specially commissioned films containing archival footage of the artist in her studio. The gallery introduces The Hepworth Family Gift, a unique collection of Hepworth’s working models that is on permanent display at The Hepworth Wakefield. Representing the first stage of the creative process, they offer an invaluable insight into her art and, in particular, her approach to working with plaster. The collection reflects the variety of ways in which Hepworth used plaster and aluminium. She preferred to make prototypes on the same scale as the finished sculptures and would have worked directly on the majority of these models. The centrepiece of the Gift is the aluminium prototype for Winged Figure, 1961 – 3, the sculpture commissioned by John Lewis Partnership for their flagship store on Oxford Street, London. At nearly six metres high, this is the only working model to survive for the monumental commissions Hepworth received in later life.