Free Admission

GALLERY GUIDESUMMER 2011

Hepworth at work on a plaster for Oval Form (Trezion)Palais de Danse, St Ives, 1963Photo: Val Wilmer ©Bowness, Hepworth Estate

INTRODUCTION

The Hepworth Wakefield is Britain’s major new art gallery, designed by the award-winning David Chipperfield Architects, who have responded to the gallery’s dramatic waterfront setting. The building complements the scale and form of the existing industrial buildings and like them rises out of the River Calder. The gallery’s façade is constructed of pigmented concrete giving the building a highly sculptural appearance that echoes the clarity and power of form in Barbara Hepworth’s work. Wakefield’s art collection is now in the care of The Hepworth Wakefield and forms the core of the permanent collection displays alongside major loans from Tate, the Arts Council Collection and others. The gallery celebrates the region’s heritage as the birthplace of modern British sculpture through the achievements of Barbara Hepworth (1903 – 1975) and Henry Moore (1898 – 1986) – two of the most important artists of the 20th century, who were born and grew up in the Wakefield district. The Hepworth Wakefield builds on this artistic legacy with a regularly changing and ambitious exhibition programme of modern and contemporary art.

WAKEFIELD’S COLLECTION

From its opening in 1934 on Wentworth Terrace, Wakefield Art Gallery swiftly developed to become one of the most forward thinking galleries of its time, with a national reputation that belied its provincial status. Established initially in 1923 with gifts from local industrialists, the gallery and its collection went on to support and collect works by some of the most significant and avant-garde British artists of the 20th century. This display explores the development of Wakefield’s art collection and traces the influence of pioneering directors Ernest Musgrave, Eric Westbrook and Helen Kapp who worked at Wakefield Art Gallery in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. The gallery’s remarkable commitment to contemporary art is evident in works by artists including locally born Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore alongside works by Hubert Dalwood (1924 – 1976), Bernard Meadows (1915 – 2005), Victor Pasmore (1908 – 1998) and John Piper (1903 – 1992).

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THE SCULPTURE OF BARBARA HEPWORTH

This gallery introduces Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture, exploring the extraordinary breadth and quality of her work. These sculptures foreground the strong connection between material, method and subject matter. The pierced and stringed cast bronze of Spring, 1966, uses an innovative sculptural form that breaks open the solid object and activates it with colour. The proud upright carved form of Figure (Nanjizal), 1958, retains a clear relationship to the original form of the tree trunk and the landscape. The exquisitely shaped marble of Cosdon Head, 1949, uses carved lines to lightly describe the contours of a hand against the face. The formal clarity of Cone and Sphere, 1973, brings together abstraction with an allusion to the upright body, and the carved and painted Two Forms with White (Greek), 1963, presents two forms – both figure and object – in conversation with each other.

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Barbara Hepworth, Two Forms with White (Greek), 1963Photo: Jonty Wilde ©Bowness, Hepworth Estate

Henry Moore, Head of a Woman, 1926The Hepworth Wakefield Photo: Norman Taylor. Courtesy Henry Moore Foundation

HEPWORTH IN CONTEXT

This gallery explores the work of Barbara Hepworth in relation to her European contemporaries and foregrounds the influence of direct carving on Modern British sculpture. Her developing ideas about sculpture, like many other British artists, were influenced by an awareness of artistic innovations on the Continent and an increased interest in sculpture and objects from across the globe. An earlier generation of sculptors including Constantin Brancusi (1876 – 1957), Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891 – 1915), and Jacob Epstein (1880 – 1959) had already broken away from the tradition of modelling and classical representation. They explored new possibilities offered through direct carving, a principle of ‘truth to materials’ whereby a sculpture’s form was dictated by the shape, density and the integral markings of wood grain or stone. The spirit of international artistic exchange was sustained through visits by British artists to Paris, and the subsequent exile to Britain of many members of the European avant-garde seeking refuge from the Nazi occupation. Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944) and Naum Gabo (1890 – 1977) based themselves in London in the late 1930s where European Modernism intersected with a British sensibility towards the landscape and the figure. This resulted in a conceptual and stylistic change in British painting and sculpture from literal depictions of a subject to a concentration on simplified form and abstraction.

HEPWORTH AT WORK

The displays in this gallery explore Hepworth’s studio environment, working practice in plaster, collaborative relationships with bronze foundries and the monumental commissions she received in the last fifteen years of her life. The gallery introduces the Hepworth Family Gift, a unique collection of Hepworth’s working models that will be on permanent display at The Hepworth Wakefield. Representing the first stage of the creative process they offer an invaluable insight into her practice and, in particular, her approach to working with plaster. The tools and materials on display here were Hepworth’s own and have been drawn from her second studio in St Ives, the Palais de Danse. Also featured is a step-by-step reconstruction of the bronze-casting process, photographs of works in progress and four specially commissioned films containing archival footage of the artist in her studio.

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Hepworth with the completed prototype of Winged Figure in the Palais yard, 1962 ©Bowness, Hepworth Estate

YORKSHIRE IN PICTURES

Yorkshire in Pictures highlights Wakefield’s collection of architectural and landscape works, including the Gott Collection, which comprises ten volumes of images of 18th and 19th century Yorkshire. This fascinating visual resource is exhibited in this gallery and is also accessible to view via a digital catalogue. Our opening displays include J.M.W. Turner’s (1775 – 1851) sketch of Wakefield’s Chantry Chapel on loan from the British Museum, alongside a selection of paintings, drawings and prints of this historic landmark drawn from the Wakefield collection. It also incorporates works by local people who have responded to the Chapel as it stands today.

HEPWORTH AND ST IVES Although Barbara Hepworth’s formative years were spent in Wakefield, her later years in Cornwall have resulted in the artist’s close association with the town of St Ives. The Cornish town has a long history as an artists’ colony dating from the late 19th century. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hepworth left London with Ben Nicholson and their triplets for the safety of St Ives. They found themselves within an active artistic community which included the ceramicists Janet Leach (1918 – 1997) and Bernard Leach (1887 – 1979), the art theorist and artist Adrian Stokes (1902 – 1972) and his wife, the artist Margaret Mellis (1914 – 2009), and the Cornish-born artist Peter Lanyon (1918 – 1964).

They were followed shortly by Naum Gabo and Miriam Gabo (1907 – 1993) and subsequently many more artists were drawn to this small town as it became an unlikely centre for modernist art. This combination of innovative artists and inspiring landscapes led to the development of a particularly British form of abstraction and St Ives became an internationally significant centre for the development of post-war contemporary art.

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THE HEPWORTH PLASTERS

The Hepworth Family Gift is a remarkable collection of Hepworth’s surviving working models for her bronze sculptures, the majority of which were made in plaster. This generous gift was made by the Hepworth Estate through the Art Fund and was one of the key reasons for building a new gallery for Wakefield, connecting Hepworth’s name with the city in which she was born and grew up.

The collection reflects the variety of ways in which Hepworth used plaster and aluminium as part of her working process. She preferred to make prototypes on the same scale as the finished sculptures and worked directly on the majority of these models. The centre-piece of the Gift is the prototype for Winged Figure, 1961 – 3, the sculpture commissioned by John Lewis for their flagship store on Oxford Street. At nearly six metres in height, this is the only full-size working model to survive of the monumental commissions Hepworth received in her later life.

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Barbara Hepworth, Spring, 1966The Hepworth Wakefield (The Hepworth Family Gift presented through the Art Fund)Photo: Mark Heathcote ©Bowness, Hepworth Estate

Her work provides a puzzling and rewarding intensification of perception. Leaning against walls, suspended in mid-air, or balancing impossibly, Rothschild’s sculptures are imbued with an ambiguous and powerful presence, both in the gallery and while exploring universally resonant forms and symbols. Rothschild has spoken of this presence, suggesting that it has the potential to produce a revelatory awareness created by the tension between the material and the spiritual: ‘Ideally, I want the works to engage and confuse the eye, and for this confusion to allow a kind of hard looking to occur where the eye and the brain become aware of looking as a way of understanding a confused or deceptive materiality. Within this way of looking there is also a hoped-for possibility of a kind of transcendent view, whereby belief in the possibilities of art, magic and transformation of both the materials and ourselves as viewers may, even momentarily, occur.’

Eva Rothschild in ‘Laura Hoptman and Eva Rothschild in conversation’ in Eva Rothschild (Koenig Books, London, 2010)

EXHIBITION GALLERIES 7 – 10

EVA ROTHSCHILD: HOT TOUCH 21 MAY – 9 OCTOBER 2011

Eva Rothschild (b.1971, Dublin) is one of the foremost contemporary sculptors working in the United Kingdom. Recent works include the 2009 Duveens commission Cold Corners for Tate Britain, which filled the gallery with a web of soaring, black triangular forms. Her current work for New York City’s Public Art Fund, Empire, 2011, is a six metre high sculpture comprising red, black and green striped arches in Central Park, acting as a gateway between the urban and natural environment. Rothschild makes her sculptures from a range of different materials including fabric, beads, polystyrene, leather and wood, crafted by hand and sometimes fabricated using industrial processes. The sculptures are conceived in relation to each other and so the associations between different production processes become closely interconnected. The modernist innovation of the hole punched through and opening up the sculpture resonates in Rothschild’s explorations of space in and around her work – each sculpture’s contours defined as much by the open space as its own physical presence. Rothschild’s sculptures can be tightly contained geometric forms without immediate and obvious figurative references, using a language of sculpture, which concentrates on simplified shape and form. The sculptures also relate to an array of visual associations and symbols, including totemic columns of piled heads and draped snakes. The titles often refer to familiar phrases or existing objects, confounding a purely formal understanding of the work. The use of colour, often limited to black, red and green, creates a strengthening of the formal properties of the sculpture while drawing in associations such as the ‘stop’ and ‘go’ of traffic lights. This exploration of the intrinsic power and meanings carried by objects produces an encounter between the minimal forms and the symbolic and inquisitive narrative potential of the works.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication with an essay by Prof. Anne Wagner, Henry Moore Foundation Research Curator at Tate Britain, author of Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture (Yale University Press, 2005). To coincide with the exhibition, Yorkshire Sculpture Park will be showing Eva Rothschild’s work Someone & Someone, 2008.

Eva Rothschild will be in conversation on Thursday 16 June, 6.30 – 8pm, £5 (£3). Please book at information desk, email events@hepworthwakefield.org or call 01924 247360.

JAMES PYMAN THE UPPER MILL, 2011

James Pyman’s work is an examination of how historical events and cultural moments can be recorded using codes and styles of drawing that include cartoons, comic books and illustration. For The Hepworth Wakefield, Pyman has captured a specific moment in the life of The Upper Mill, with its status caught between its past as part of the city’s industrial heritage and its future within the grounds of the new gallery. Pyman has precisely drawn the existing building’s walls as a series of detailed architect’s elevations, and these images have been scaled up and printed to wrap the building to dramatic effect. The Upper Mill dates from the turn of the 19th century and would have originally been used as a corn mill.

HEATHER AND IVAN MORISON THE BLACK CLOUD, 2009 – 2011 The Black Cloud is a towering wooden pavilion inspired by architectural forms from around the world. The structure takes its shape from Amazonian dwellings used by the Yanomamo tribe for performances, discussion and play, and has been built in the Amish tradition of a barn-raising. The Black Cloud has been conceived to provide protection from various imagined climatic scenarios; the structure itself is protected from the elements by an ancient Japanese scorching technique. The Black Cloud is a hybrid of sculpture and multi-functional social space. It is a structure that can be categorised in many different ways: a mysterious landmark; a meeting point; a place to hide; a stage for performance and a remarkable new sculpture. Heather and Ivan Morison have constructed a timber platform for The Black Cloud creating a protected and alternative architectural space against the backdrop of The Hepworth Wakefield. Please see the events programme for further details.

James Pyman, Wakefield Watermill, 2011Courtesy of the artist and Maureen Paley, LondonHeather and Ivan Morison, The Black Cloud, 2009

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The Black Cloud was originally commissioned by Situations at the University of the West of England for Victoria Park, Bristol in 2009. The commission in Wakefield is supported by Art in Yorkshire.

1 Learning Studios 2 Shop 3 Hepworth Café Bar4 Terrace 5 Auditorium6 Lockers 7 Lift / Stairs8 Archive (by appointment)

Information

Toilets / Accessible Toilet

Exterior Sculptures & Installations:

9 Hollow Form with Inner Form 10 Minos11 Ascending Form (Gloria) 12 Family of Man13 The Black Cloud14 The Upper Mill

Collection Displays: Gallery 1 The Sculpture of Barbara HepworthGallery 2 Wakefield’s CollectionGallery 3 Hepworth in ContextGallery 4 Hepworth at WorkGallery 5 The Hepworth PlastersGallery 6 Yorkshire in Pictures / Hepworth and St Ives Exhibition Galleries: Galleries 7 – 10 Eva Rothschild: Hot Touch

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FIRST FLOORGROUND FLOOR & GALLERY GARDEN

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9 Barbara Hepworth Hollow Form with Inner Form, 1968 Bronze, The Hepworth Estate The working model for this sculpture can be viewed in The Hepworth Plasters gallery. 10 Hubert Dalwood Minos, 1962 Aluminium with grey patina, The Hepworth Wakefield, (donated by Eric and Jean Cass through the Contemporary Art Society 2010) 11 Barbara Hepworth Ascending Form (Gloria), 1958 Bronze, The Hepworth Wakefield, (donated by Eric and Jean Cass through the Contemporary Art Society 2010) 12 Barbara Hepworth Family of Man, 1970 Bronze, The Hepworth Wakefield (H.M. Government accepted in lieu of tax)

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EXTERIOR SCULPTURES

Collections and exhibitions supported by

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