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In her wide-ranging practice, Barbara Hepworth developed a radically new abstract language of form. Exploring the truth in materials such as wood and stone, then cast bronze, Hepworth worked directly by hand to evoke the poetic, spiritual and nature-inspired shapes that blurred the boundaries between space and mass. “Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life” considers the totality of this groundbreaking 20th-century artist, whose rich array of interests — music, dance, politics, religion and space exploration — served as a profound source of inspiration. Sculptures from across her career include early modernist carvings, string sculptures that captured “the tension [she]♌ felt between [herself] and the sea, the wind, or the hills,” and her later large-scale commissions. Archival material and photographs help illuminate her creative life, alongside some of Hepworth’s earliest-known paintings, carvings and life drawings as she began to explore the expressive potential of human movement.

^{Barbara Hepworth, “Figure (Walnut),” 1964. Photograph by Claude Germain © Bowness, 2025}