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The
first Spanish retrospective of the British sculptress
Barbara Hepworth is being presented by the Institut
Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) from 2 September
to 14 November 2004 to accompany the events prepared
in 2003 to celebrate the centenary of her birth.
The exhibition, consisting of 54 works with dates
ranging from 1932 to 1974, sets out to give an overall
view of Hepworth’s oeuvre, paying particular
attention to the different materials which she used
in her career, such as stone, marble, wood and bronze;
and to the themes that nourished her work, such as
landscape, open and closed forms, interrelated masses
and individual forms.
Barbara Hepworth (Wakefield, Yorkshire, 1903 –
St Ives, Cornwall, 1975) studied at Leeds School of
Art and at the Royal College of Art in London between
1920 and 1923. During a period spent in Italy between
1924 and 1926 she studied Romanesque art, primitive
Renaissance sculpture and the work of Masaccio, Giotto,
Cimabue and Michelangelo, and it was there that she
met her future husband, the sculptor John Skeaping,
who taught her to carve marble.
In the thirties, during visits to Paris and the north
of Europe with fellow artist Ben Nicholson, who became
her second husband, she met Picasso, Mondrian, Gabo,
Giacometti, Arp, Taeuber-Arp, Herbin, Hélion,
Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, Domela, Braque and Brancusi,
among others. She became a member of the Seven and
Five Society in 1932 and Unit One in 1934, and Auguste
Herbin and Jean Hélion invited her to join
the Abstraction-Création group in 1933.
Hepworth reacted against the abstract sculpture that
she found in Paris during the thirties and moved towards
abstract-organic sculpture, such as that of Brancusi,
or towards Gabo’s Constructivist style.
Barbara Hepworth was one of the first artists in Britain
to introduce the “hole” motif in her work.
Her sculptures were often inspired by nature and made
by carving rather than modelling.
The possibility existing between interior and exterior
and between surface and mass was a key characteristic
of Hepworth’s sculpture, becoming the main focus
for her works in stone and bronze, and it was the
possibilities of wood that first enabled her to take
this idea to unexpected limits.
The catalogue published by the IVAM to accompany this
show reproduces the works exhibited and includes contributions
by Chris Stephens, Senior Curator at Tate Britain
in London; Patricia Mayayo, who teaches Art History
at the European University’s School of Art and
Architecture in Madrid; Amparo Amorós; Kosme
de Barañano; Sophie Bowness, who is responsible
for the Barbara Hepworth Estate in London; and Teresa
Millet, the curator of the exhibition.
Would
you write your opinion ?
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Barbara
Hepworth.
Mother
and Child, 193.
Sculpture
with Colour, 1943.
Three Forms in Echelon, 1970
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