Royal Academy of Arts

A 17th century trailblazer rediscovered. Active in Brussels in the middle of the 17th century, Michaelina Wautier challenged the limits imposed on female artists at the time by working on an unusually varied range of subjects: from flowers and portraits to grand history paintings - which was a format usually reserved for her male counterparts. In her most famous painting, The Triumph of Bacchus , she painted herself as a pagan bacchante in monumental scale, looking squarely at the viewer and confidently asserting her position as the maker. Although Wautier was hugely successful in her time, her breathtaking paintings and her place in art history were almost lost in the 18th century. This exhibition puts Wautier back in her rightful place as one of Europe’s most important artists.

Meet the rebel painter of the British art world. This exhibition brings together Rose Wylie’s most iconic artworks with brand-new and previously unseen paintings, in the biggest exhibition of the artist’s work to date. Wylie’s work is alive with references to cinema, celebrities, literature, and ancient civilisations. Her cast of characters—primarily women—includes Elizabeth I, Nicole Kidman, Marilyn Monroe, Serena Williams, and Snow White. These cultural and historical references rub alongside her own experiences, such as living through the Blitz as a young girl. Wylie found success early in her career as a painter, which she started later in life in her fifties. Since then, she has cemented her place as a cultural icon; her art, her singular style and even her paint-strewn studio in the Kent countryside making waves across the art world, fashion scene and beyond. Wylie's art is bold and striking, and offers a reminder that life is full of small, often funny, but no less touching moments.

Experience a constellation of avant-garde artists who have shaped the trajectory of Indian Modernism through to contemporary art. At its core, the radical work of Mrinalini Mukherjee. This exhibition traces more than 100 years of South Asian art, from the 1920s to the present day, through the people and places that influenced Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949-2015). Her artworks fuse abstraction with the human form – drawing on nature, regional traditions of architecture and craft and international Modernist art and design. Alongside Mukherjee, the exhibition features seminal work by her parents, Leela Mukherjee and Benode Behari Mukherjee, who taught at Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, the pioneering art school founded by poet and polymath Rabindranath Tagore. It also celebrates key figures of the Indian cultural scene, including KG Subramanyan, Jagdish Swaminathan, Nilima Sheikh and Gulammohammed Sheikh. The works on view range from monumental woven sculptures to intricate paintings, ceramics, collages and drawings.