Barbara Hepworth: Relationships to Space

Barbara Hepworth - Rock Form (Porthcurno) - 1964 - Bronze, Edition of 6, Cast No. 3 - 99-3/4 x 42 x 17 in. (253.4 x 106.7 x 43.2 cm) - Norton Simon Museum - Pasadena, CABritish artist Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) distinguished herself as a world-recognized sculptor during 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. 

Hepworth’s development of sculptural vocabularies and ideas was complex and multi-faceted. It 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 were of keen interest to her.

The work featured here retains the curving planes of much of her work. She produced it at a time when an increased demand for her work led her away from stone sculpture to bronze. Hepworth had a prosperous career within the modernist movement in England.