Barbara Hepworth
Barbara Hepworth was an abstract sculptor and artist associated with the British post-war art movement.
She was educated at Leeds School of Art (1920–1) and the Royal College of Art, London (1921–4). 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 1939, 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.
First working in stone, Hepworth began to create metal sculptures in the late 1950s, 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 (1964) in front of the United Nations building in New York and the nineteen-feet Winged Figure (1963) on the John Lewis building on London’s Oxford Street. Affected by cancer from the mid-1960s, 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.
