Barbara Hepworth

Barbara Hepworth (Wakefield, Yorkshire 1903 – St Ives, Cornwall 1975) She studied at the Leeds School of Art and subsequently at the Royal College of Art in London. She learnt to carve marble in Italy with her first husband, John Skeaping. During a visit to Paris with her second husband, fellow-artist Ben Nicholson, she met Picasso and Mondrian. She became a member of the Seven and Five Society in 1932, and of Abstraction-Création and Unit One in 1934.

Her sculptures were often inspired by nature and were made by carving rather than modelling. She was one of the first artists in Great Britain that pioneered the introduction of the hole motif in her works, and in some of her sculptures she used string. In the thirties she began working with abstract shapes, creating forms in tension and also subtle relationships in her pieces. Reacting to the abstract sculpture that she discovered in Paris during the thirties, Hepworth tended towards organic-abstract sculpture like that of Brancusi or towards the Constructivism of Gabo. Barbara Hepworth’s work was also notably enriched by her relationship with Ben Nicholson, each influencing the other.

The selective exhibition of Barbara Hepworth at the IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, will be the first to be organised in Spain about this British artist, and it forms part of the celebrations prepared in connection with the centenary of her birth in 2003.

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Barbara Hepworth
Centro Julio Gonzalez - Galería 1
Kurator: Teresa Millet