Barbara Hepworth: Sculpting & Painting

Piano Nobile presents 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 and the display suggests a poignant relationship between that environment and the works that Hepworth made there. She remained there from 1949 until her death, and in 1980 it was made a public museum dedicated her life and work, owned and managed by Tate.

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.

For further information or a list of available works please contact the gallery.