Barbara Hepworth: Sculpting & Painting

Piano Nobile is delighted to present a display focusing on Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures and paintings from the late forties till the end of her life. The installation evokes the atmosphere of Hepworth’s Cornish studio at Trewyn with works displayed on platforms, plinths and modelling stands referencing those used by the artist in her lifetime.

The eminent critic Herbert Read once wrote that Hepworth's work was ‘perfect in its freedom, its force and its contemporaneity’. ‘All they ask’, he continued, ‘is the simple sensuous reception we would give to a flower or a shell, or the lovely pebble we instinctively pickup from the beach’. 

In 1936, Hepworth became the first English sculptor to have their work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and she later won wider acclaim with a large display at the Venice Biennale in 1952. She has since been widely recognised as one of the great sculptors of the twentieth century.