Barbara Hepworth Overview
Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1903, Hepworth studied at Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art, London, after showing early artistic interest in natural forms and textures. She explored these areas of interest in a wide array of media, and whilst she is most known for her stone and bronze sculptures, her work in printmaking and collage are equally admired. Her work has led to art history considering her one of the most influential sculptors of the twentieth century, and she is credited as creating some of the earliest forms of abstract sculpture in Britain.
The entirely abstract nature of her work came to be in the early 1930s, as purely formal elements gained importance in her work over naturalistic features. Hepworth has quoted that relationships in space were her main artistic interest by this time, as she used sculpture to explore the tensions between size and texture, weight and volume. The empty spaces that existed within her sculptures were of equal importance to the artist as their solid form, and Hepworth would create paintings and prints of the shapes that these ‘structural voids’ created, in an expression of their artistic importance.
Hepworth lived and worked mostly in St. Ives, Cornwall, where she was a prominent figure within the St. Ives School of Artists. After she died in 1975, her home/studio was preserved and opened to the public as the Barbara Hepworth Home and Sculpture Garden, run by the Tate St. Ives. At Wilson55, our in-house expert Stephen Sparrow has years of experience in assessing and valuing Barbara Hepworth’s work, so do get in touch if you’d like to learn more about a piece you own or discuss a potential sale or valuation.
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