Barbara Hepworth (1903 - 1975)

Dame Barbara Hepworth was without doubt Britain's first greatest sculptress. She was a pioneer of her time and the first woman sculpture to achieve international prominence. Her diminutive frame belied her magnificent modernist sculptures. Her slender hands carving iconic pieces that grace the landscapes of Britain, America, Japan, Europe, New Zealand and Australia. Barbara Hepworth's unrelenting exploration of shape and texture, light and shade and most crucially space, make her award winning pieces both expansive and intimate, their physical density and visual focus simultaneously evoking vistas natural, personal and social. Barbara Hepworth's notable works are still studied and marvelled at today as they continue to reside in every national museum around the world. Nobody puts it better than Will Gompertz in the Guardian when describing his admiration for this great woman "Her capacity to create something so beguiling, so intelligent, so mesmerizingly coherent, from the most basic materials. It is genuinely amazing: a sort of alchemy." more