Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World

Barbara Hepworth was born in Yorkshire in 1903. She lived in Cornwall since 1939 and has become principally associated with the art of St Ives and with the sea and landscape of that place. This exhibition presents her in a broader light and spans her whole career. 

Hepworth emerged in the late 1920s as a leading member of a new generation of sculptors. Her work became increasingly abstract in the 1930s and, after moving to Cornwall, she began to make sculpture in terms of her experience of landscape. She continued to carve throughout her life, but from 1956 she also made works in bronze which allowed her to produce more and which were better suited to international travel.

This exhibition traces Hepworth’s growing international success offering fresh ways of thinking about her art. Uniquely, this retrospective also plays with the different spaces in which Hepworth presented her work – the show includes an impressive reconstruction of a modernist structure to showcase Hepworth’s ‘ideal’ environment. Among the highlights are four large sculptures in sumptuous African hardwood – the high point in her post war carving career – reunited in one room.

Alongside sculpture the show features fascinating photographs that have never been seen before in public, rarely seen textiles, collages, film and selected works by her peers and predecessors from Jacob Epstein to Henry Moore.