A year ago, Barbara Hepworth’s Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red was sold at Christie’s to an anonymous overseas bidder. Now, after a significant public campaign, it will remain in the UK – secured for permanent public display at The Hepworth Wakefield.

Created in 1943, the work exemplifies Hepworth’s experimental style during her time in St Ives, Cornwall, where she relocated at the start of the Second World War, at the invitation of art critic Adrian Stokes and his wife, artist Margaret Mellis. Its hollow oval form, approximately 50cm in length, features strings – a motif of Hepworth’s wartime work – stretched across a pale blue interior. It is distinctive for its use of coloured strings, making it a singular piece within the artist’s oeuvre.

The sculpture’s origins are rooted in the challenges of wartime Britain. In November 1940, an incendiary bomb destroyed most of the works in Hepworth’s London studio. She had taken just one piece with her to St Ives: the model for Sculpture with Colour. With traditional materials like marble and quality wood in short supply, Hepworth was forced to work in plaster until receiving a special permit for wood in 1942.

Originally acquired directly from Hepworth in 1944 by collector Helen Sutherland, the piece later passed through the family of art historian Nicolete Gray.

Sculpture with Colour is now recognised as a rare masterpiece of British abstract modernism. Thus, when the work was sold, the UK government implemented a temporary export bar under the Waverley Criteria, giving British institutions a chance to raise the funds to retain it.

The Hepworth Wakefield – a gallery in Hepworth’s birthplace of West Yorkshire – launched a £3.8 million fundraising campaign in partnership with UK-based charity the Art Fund. That goal was met ahead of the deadline of 27 August 2025. The Art Fund contributed £750,000, alongside a £1.89 million grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and donations from more than 2,800 members of the public. The campaign was also supported by prominent artists and creatives, including Sir Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Richard Deacon, Joanna Scanlan and Dame Rachel Whiteread.

The sculpture will now go on display at The Hepworth Wakefield, as well as being made available for loan to institutions across the UK – an outcome that Olivia Colling, interim director and CEO at the gallery, has said the artist would be ‘delighted’ with: ‘Hepworth often talked about her need to be part of a community and its proactive development.’

A new exhibition at London gallery Piano Nobile will feature works by English artist and sculptor Barbara Hepworth that have, up until now, only been viewed as part of private collections. Barbara Hepworth: Strings coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s death.

The presentation will focus on Hepworth’s use of string. Even if you haven’t heard of the artist, you may have seen her ‘string’ work in the form of the sculpture mounted on the side of John Lewis in Oxford Street: featuring huge aluminium rods, Winged Figure has been displayed in London since 1963.

This is one of dozens of string sculptures that Hepworth created during her five-decade career, which range from large to small, rendered in materials including plaster, wood, metal, bronze and stone. She would also use string-like motifs in her paintings and drawings. Barbara Hepworth: Strings is the first exhibition dedicated to this aspect of Hepworth’s oeuvre.

The exhibition features works that span three decades, including rarely-exhibited stringed sculptures from a tiny ‘hand sculpture’, as Hepworth called her smaller works, to the vast Winged Figure I, which is coming to London for the first time in a generation.

Barbara Hepworth: Strings will delve into the stories surrounding Hepworth’s sculptures. For example, Theme on Electronics (Orpheus), inspired by the mythological bard playing his lyre, was a 1956 commission from electronics company Mullard for its head office. It was placed on a motorised pedestal which, somewhat embarrassingly for an electronics company, didn’t work. This bothered Hepworth so much that she sent a series of letters to Mullard, one of which stated: ‘During the last decade, I have often been very dismayed to find that either the work was not moving around, or, if it did, it jerked’. She later proposed that Theme on Electronics should ‘stand quite still so there is no more fuss about its electronics motor’.

When Mullard closed down in the late 1970s, the sculpture transferred to Phillips, which had absorbed the smaller company. It was bought in the 2000s by a private individual, who is now loaning the work to Piano Nobile to be displayed for the first time.

Also being exhibited for the first time: the aforementioned Winged Figure I, a brass work with twine strings from 1957. David Hitchcock, an art student at St Martin’s Teacher Training College in Lancaster, wrote to Hepworth to say that his ‘college would be honoured to have a piece of [her] work on [its] new campus’. However, he only had £250, which was not enough to purchase Winged Figure I. Hitchcock eventually raised £1,000 (the work is now estimated to be worth six figures), which Hepworth agreed to. The sculpture soon had to be returned to the artist’s studio to be ‘re-stringed’, however, as it had been placed outside; it was kept inside thereafter at Hepworth’s insistence.

It may not have been the most durable of materials, but Hepworth favoured this fisherman’s twine above all else, and regularly went to the harbour in her native St Ives to buy it. The interplay between this humble, domestic material and some of her loftier interests is one of the major draws of her work: she was fascinated by space exploration – Pierced Hemisphere (Telstar), for example, whose appearance at Piano Nobile will be its debut in the UK, was inspired by the 1960s tracking satellite.

Hepworth is arguably one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century. She led the charge of modern art, reflecting her passionate interest in technological and political change. Her sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative work expanded the possibilities for sculpture and other mediums; this exhibition represents a rare opportunity to see it in public.

‘Barbara Hepworth: Strings’ at Piano Nobile, London, February – 2 May 2025, piano-nobile.com

Growing up, Virginia Woolf spent family holidays in St Ives, and the Cornish town and surrounding coastal landscapes left a profound impression on the British modernist author, later becoming a constant reference in her writing – The Godrevy Lighthouse of St Ives Bay is famously transposed to Scotland in her 1927 novel To The Lighthouse.

As much as the rugged, rolling landscapes were the basis for Woolf’s settings, her fiction is equally well known for its symbolic interiors, most vivid in her seminal work, A Room of One’s Own.

Tate St Ives celebrates Woolf’s scenes and their metaphors in a major new exhibition; it's the first time that Woolf’s writing and feminism has been explored in this way, through the visions of more than 80 artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, not all of them blockbuster names, but including some, such as Laura Knight, Barbara Hepworth, Linder, Claude Cahun, and Woolf’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell.

Going back to 1854 – three decades before Woolf was born – the works trace a trajectory of female frustration with the patriarchy. For most of that history, as Woolf herself wrote, ‘Anonymous was a woman’ – and many of these works received little attention in their day, and many of the artists have been neglected or forgotten.

Neatly divided into two ‘sections’, one looking outwards and the other in, there are many satisfying visual connections between Woolf’s room and the mustard Chintz sofa Ethel Sands painted in 1910, or the view from Knight’s rainy window. The fragmented self-portraits of feminine identity as depicted by Linder or Cahun’s photographs, meanwhile draw on Woolf’s ambivalence about a woman’s physical space and social role. There is further, meandering symbiosis between Woolf’s words, the undulating landscapes outside the gallery, and the crafted curves of Paule Vézelay’s plaster sculptures, among others.

One hundred years on from the historic moment women in Britain could vote for the first time, the exhibition is also, of course, an opportunity to reflect back on the progress women have made in society in terms of rights, and how these changes have affected their image of themselves – proud, dejected, determined, disabused – and how they perceive their position in the world.

INFORMATION

‘Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired By Her Writings’ is on view at Tate St Ives until 29 April. The exhibition will run at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, from 26 May – 16 September; and Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, from 2 October – 9 December. For more information, visit the Tate St Ives website

ADDRESS

Tate St Ives
Porthmeor Beach
Saint Ives TR26 1TG

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Italian photographer Luisa Lambri has built her reputation shooting modernist architecture, particularly houses. And the very best, at that. She has photographed homes designed by Lautner, Neutra, Barragan, Le Corbusier, Niemeyer, Breuer and on. But rather than catching sweeping forms, meticulous mass, Lambri goes in close, onto windows and shutters, framing skylights, moving in on surfaces. These are not so much abstractions, but – and Lambri has been deeply influenced by the domestic portraits and self-portraits of the late Francesca Woodman – intimacies. Or, in the play of light, in the turn of a corner, a search for intimacy.

In her new show at London’s Thomas Dane gallery, Lambri gets intimate with post-war modernist sculpture, specifically pieces by Donald Judd, the Brazilian Neo-Concrete artist Lygia Clark, German minimalist Charlotte Poseneske and Barbara Hepworth (the show takes that particular route, mapped out by architects OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, who created the internal architecture for the show).

Lambri’s camera pokes inside Judd’s aluminium boxes, confusing scale and creating rooms of confusing perspective (and revealing Judd’s famously low tolerances); closes in on the hinges and joints of Glark’s moveable aluminium bichos; frames Hepworth’s own framing of a lushly tropical garden in St Ives, creating a portal into a fantastic other world; and, most successfully perhaps, creates abstract blocks of colour in Poseneske’s aluminium sheets.

In the gallery’s other space, a few doors up, the LA-based curator Douglas Fogle has put together a companion piece for Lambri’s show. Taking off from Kasimir Malevich’s idea of the architecktons (quasi-architectural maquettes without windows) Blind Architecture includes the work of 20 artists that come at architecture from strange angles.

The show jumps from remarkable photographs of sculptural maquettes produced by the Soviet VKhUTEMAS Workshops in the 1920s; Man Ray’s Dust Breeding, a shot of a Duchamp’s The Large Glass turned into an odd, alien landscape by gathered dust and detritus; and on through a Martin Kippenberger collection of snapshots, tagged Pyschobuildings; Carl Andre’s typewritten concrete poetry; Imi Knoebel’s pioneering projections onto the facades of buildings; and Sol LeWitt’s biographical cut-outs of aerial shots of Manhattan and Chicago. As well as, inevitably, the Becher’s blind industrial buildings and infrastructure, which seem to dominate the space as the always do.

Also included is a wonderful Catherine Opie miniature of LA freeways; Jean-Luc Mouléne’s Monopole, a five-starred onyx sculpture based on wave breakers, a form, as Fogle explains, based on complex modelling of an ‘anti-wave’; and quasi-maquettes, in painted bronze by Ricky Swallow, and ceramics by Ron Nagle. It’s a show of odd resonances, creating a strange sort of cityscape.

INFORMATION

’Luisa Lambri with OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen’ and ’Blind Architecture’ are on view till 9 January, 2016. For more information, visit the Thomas Dane Gallery website

ADDRESS

3 & 11 Duke Street St James's
London SW1Y 6BN
UK

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For the tenth edition of Sotheby's annual outdoor sculpture installation 'Beyond Limits: The Landscape of British Sculpture 1950-2015', the auction house has invited respected art historian and commentator Tim Marlow to curate an exhibition that celebrates the understated success of British sculpture.

Opened yesterday in the majestic grounds of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, the showcase hones in on the post-war period, from 1950 to the present day. Working together with Simon Stock, Sotheby's senior international specialist in impressionist and modern art, Tim Marlow has expertly pulled together 39 works by 30 artists and woven them into the gardens at Chatsworth, where they frame the estate's sweeping vistas. Visitors can witness how pieces from the 1960s by pioneers such as Reg Butler and Barbara Hepworth paved the way for present day artists such as Sarah Lucas, Mark Wallinger and Conrad Shawcross.

'We’ve been able to curate an exhibition that responds to the growing interest in outdoor sculpture, and also explores and celebrates the rise of British sculpture,' says Marlow, who serves as director of artistic programmes at the Royal Academy. 'The relationship of the landscape to the works on display is integral – whether they were directly inspired by or conceived in opposition to the idea of landscape. The result, I hope, will be a sparky, creative conversation between some of the best British sculpture of the last 65 years and one of the greatest of all British country houses and its surrounding landscape.'

INFORMATION
Website
Courtesy of Sotheby’s. ’Beyond Limits: The Landscape of British Sculpture 1950-2015’ is on show at Chatsworth House until 25 October

ADDRESS

Chatsworth House
Bakewell
Derbyshire
DE45 1PP

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Barbara Hepworth always suffered from not being Henry Moore. Or, in fact, from not being any old Henry, John or Jacob. Sculpture being a man's business and all. Except, maybe it's not quite that simple. Certainly, Hepworth doesn't have the brand recognition that Moore does. But as a new retrospective at Tate Britain – her first for almost 50 years – makes clear, during the 1950s and 60s Hepworth was an artist of international standing in the way that Moore never really was. In 1950 she flew the flag at the Venice Biennale – and it's a Barbara Hepworth in Manhattan's UN Plaza, not a Henry Moore.

'Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World' is recognition that Hepworth's stock has been rising exponentially in recent years; that her abstracts now resonate more powerfully than Moore's looming figures and that her carvings in African hardwood have aged remarkably well. She certainly gets name-checked more than often than Moore these days, by designers if not artists. Hepworth is a true modernist icon in ways Moore is not.

It seems that Hepworth had planned that all along. One of the more fascinating elements of the show are her photographic collages, which first appeared in The Architectural Review in 1939, placing her works alongside modernist houses by the likes of Neutra. This now feels like a very smart move, positioning her work as part of the broader modernist project (and ensuring that she is now fetishised by the same people who fetishise Case Study Houses and Finn Juhl sofas). Indeed, the exhibition makes clear how much care and attention Hepworth  – the toughest of cookies – paid to show her work was well represented in art magazines and beyond.

Another joy of the show is a room dedicated to the marvelous Gerrit Rietveld Pavilion at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Holland, which has housed a permanent installation of Hepworth's work since 1965. For this exhibition, Tate Britain worked with architect Jamie Fobert and students of the RCA to create a temporary take on the Pavilion, housing six works from the late 1950s and early 60s.

ADDRESS

Tate Britain
Millbank
London, SW1P 4RG

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'I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow. The thrust and the contour.' This 1961 quote by Barbara Hepworth, written on a wall in one of the ten gallery spaces at the Hepworth Wakefield, reflects an understanding of the sculptor's own influences and attempts to avert any one-sided readings of her work.

Hepworth's fondness for the Yorkshire and Cornwall landscapes was doubtless formative in the development of her sculpture, but there was far more to her work than that, Penelope Curtis explained in her talk last Friday. Curtis was speaking at the Hepworth Wakefield, where two exhibitions form a prelude to this summer's Hepworth retrospective at Tate Britain, where Curtis currently presides as director.

Spread over the upper floor of the David Chipperfield Architects-designed building in West Yorkshire, 'A Greater Freedom: Hepworth 1965-1975' focuses on the last ten years of Hepworth's life, in which she explored new ideas and materials. The second exhibition, 'Hepworth in Yorkshire', offers a glimpse into her early life, displaying a selection of Hepworth's early artworks alongside archive photographs and a some of her own studio tools.

In her talk, Curtis also pointed out the importance of Hepworth's relationship to architecture and her belief in a unity of purpose within art, reflecting the wider context in which she worked. She wanted to do 'something bigger' than simply produce sculpture that would be treated as of secondary importance by architects. She endeavoured to reintroduce the human aspect of making and a sense of spontaneity in her work. By purposefully presenting her exhibitions as a bit of a jumble, as she often did by dotting potted plants between works placed on breeze blocks, Hepworth prefigured a more modern form of museum display.

Another exhibition at the gallery, titled 'Plasters: Casts and Copies' runs concurrently. Inspired by Hepworth's plaster prototypes, it surveys the modeling process from antiquity until the modern period. Standout pieces include 'Single Form', an abstract shape in blue painted plaster, which traveled to Paris during the war years, and Hepworth's prints from 'The Aegean Suite', which show a typically Sixties preoccupation with space travel. The exploratory show stands as a perfect complement to the duet of Hepworth exhibitions, forming additional proof of the sculptor's relationship with international artists and her striving to satisfy both the visual and social needs of society.

ADDRESS

The Hepworth Wakefield
Gallery Walk
Wakefield
WF1 5AW

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