Granite Forms, red, yellow and deep blue

'Granite Forms' was made in 1953, at a rich and developing time in Hepworth’s career. A few years before, in 1949, Hepworth had moved to Trewyn Studio in St Ives, where she was to live and work for the rest of her life (and which is now the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden run by the Tate). This ideal space gave her the opportunity to make larger scale works. The late 1940s and early 1950s were a pivotal and fascinating period of Hepworth’s career as she began to receive public commissions and wider recognition. After a decade of being pre-occupied with landscape, Hepworth returned to the human form as an area of interest. A lot of her sculptures and paintings from this time include the word ‘form’ and 'forms’ in their titles, as she balanced a dialogue between figuration and abstraction in her investigations into single and dual forms. Hepworth said of these works: “I began to consider a group of separate figures as a single sculptural identity, and I started working on the idea of two or more figures as a unity, blended into one carved and rhythmic form”.

1953

Pencil and oil on gesso-prepared board

35.6 x 25.4cm

© Bowness. Image courtesy of The Ingram Collection

This work is part of The Ingram Collection of Modern British & Contemporary Art and was on loan to the Lightbox for the exhibition "Redressing the balance: Women Artists from The Ingram Collection" (11 August - 20 September 2020).