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After taking over the artist's studio in St Ives to establish
The Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1980, the Tate now hosts a retrospective on Hepworth's life and works at Tate Britain, which finishes next month on 25th October.
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World presents the clearest picture of the artist to further the viewer's understanding of the scope of her work. The multi-disciplinary exhibition includes photographs and films of Hepworth, collages, textiles, whilst also putting her in the context of works by her sculpting contemporaries, such as Henry Moore, and Jacob Epstein.
Like Moore's work, Hepworth manages to convey a life within her sculptures which belies the inertia of its form. Curves and shapes rise, seemingly of their own accord, out from woods and bronzes, and her pieces have a warmth that cannot be contained by the white walls of the gallery.
And while Hepworth's works are often exhibited outdoors, where they can mirror back the landscape that inspires them, the range of work that Tate Britain's exhibition offers overtakes the need for natural setting.
The Tate Britain holds the exhibition as if to place Hepworth at the centre of the modernist sculpting movement in the latter part of the 2oth century, with its emphasis on the creative process almost coming before the art on display itself. However, the variety of work, and the individual beauty of all of her pieces, whatever the medium or material, allows the viewer to think how right the Tate was to assert that.
www.tate.org.uk
