From its simple origins in her studio, Barbara Hepworth’s abstract sculpture has become iconic, taking pride of place in museum collections worldwide and outside buildings such as the UN headquarters in New York. Celebrated throughout her career in Britain, she was also a leading figure in international modern art.

This major exhibition charts her progress from the earliest surviving carvings to the large-scale bronzes of the 1960s. Among the highlights are four large sculptures in sumptuous African hardwood – the high point of her post-war carving career – reunited in one room.

Uniquely, this retrospective shows the way Hepworth’s work was presented or imagined in contexts such as the studio, the theatre, the landscape or with architecture. Alongside sculpture, it features rarely seen textiles, photographs, collages and film, and selected works by her peers and predecessors from Jacob Epstein to Henry Moore.

http://www.tate.org.uk/

http://krollermuller.nl/visit

http://www.arpmuseum.org/

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Film

    A transparent, flexible plastic material, usually of cellulose acetate or polyester, on which light-sensitive emulsion is coated, or on which an image can be formed by various transfer processes.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Sculpture

    A three-dimensional work of art. Such works may be carved, modelled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, relief, and made in a huge variety of media. Contemporary practice also includes live elements, as in Gilbert & George 'Living Sculpture' as well as broadcast work, radio or sound sculpture.