Barbara hepworth family

Born Wakefield, England

Died St Ives, England

Biography

Barbara Hepworth was an abstract sculptor and artist associated with the British post-war art movement. She was educated at Leeds School of Art (–1) and the Royal College of Art, London (–4).

Upon graduation, she spent two years in Italy to study the techniques of marble carving, followed by time in London exhibiting with the Seven and Five Society and the modernist group, Unit One. In , she moved to St Ives, Cornwall, where she became a central figure in the artistic community. The landscapes of both Yorkshire and Cornwall had a profound effect on her work throughout her career; in particular, shaping her ideas about light, and the relationship between nature and the human figure.

British artist barbara hepworth biography Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. She married the sculptor John Skeaping in In she fell in love with the painter Ben Nicholson , and in divorced Skeaping. At this time she was part of a circle of modern artists centred on Hampstead, London, and was one of the founders of the art movement Unit One. Best known as a sculptor, Hepworth also produced drawings — including a series of sketches of operating rooms following the hospitalisation of her daughter in — and lithographs.

First working in stone, Hepworth began to create metal sculptures in the late s, giving abstract form to these central ideas on a scale larger than ever before. This transition in scale and medium led to public commissions including Single Form () in front of the United Nations building in New York and the nineteen-feet Winged Figure () on the John Lewis building on London’s Oxford Street.

Affected by cancer from the mids, she increasingly experimented with smaller and stacked forms. Her former studio in St Ives has been preserved as a public museum, with her career having formed the subject of several major retrospectives, including at the Tate Gallery Liverpool.

Artwork Information

Several critics have interpreted the shape of Ascending Form (Gloria) () by Barbara Hepworth as a pair of hands in prayer.

The sculpture was made during a period of renewed spirituality for the artist, following the death of her son Paul in Its abstract or non-representational nature speaks to her mission to achieve human significance through sculptural form.

Hepworth began to work in bronze from the s.

British artist barbara hepworth biography wikipedia Barbara Hepworth distinguished herself as a world-recognized sculptor in a period where female artists were rare. She evolved her ideas and her work as an influential part of an ongoing conversation with many other important artists of her time, working crucially in areas of greater abstraction while creating three dimensional objects. Her development of sculptural vocabularies and ideas was complex and multi-faceted. This included the use of a wide range of physical materials for sculpting and an unprecedented sensitivity to the particular qualities of those materials in helping decide the ultimate results of her sculptures, the investigation of "absence" in sculpture as much as "presence," and deep considerations of the relationship of her sculptural forms to the larger spaces surrounding it. Though her forms in their larger outlines tended to possess the clean lines of modernist aesthetics, she complicated these with different textures, an effect described by one reviewer as "sensuous and tactile" that "quickened the pulse".

Despite their larger size, Hepworth retained the artist&#;s hand in these works, as seen in the highly textured surface achieved through direct carving. This technique applied to bronze was revolutionary at a time when sculptors were taught only to model in clay. Her experience in Italy informed this technique. Hepworth explained, ‘I only learned my love for bronze when I found that it was gentle and I could file it and carve it and chisel it’; [in Italy] ‘there I felt the continuity of aesthetic sensibility and was humbled by the richness of her heritage’.

Bronze works by Hepworth often appear in various editions.

There are eight copies of Ascending Form (Gloria), with one sitting in the former studio and now museum to Hepworth in St Ives, and another standing at the entrance to Longstone Cemetery in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, where the artist is buried.