Barbara Hepworth

Exhibited by Piano Nobile

Material Oil and pencil on board

Dimensions 33.7 × 50.8 cm

Place of Creation UK

Price Price Upon Inquiry

Status Vetted

About the Work

Between 1956 and 1964, two principal visual components defined Hepworth’s abstract ‘drawings’. First, a painterly ground was improvised, with warm and cool colours scumbled together to create complex layers with an ambivalent sense of depth and surface. She explained in 1961: ‘When I am making a drawing, I like to begin with a board which I have prepared with a definite texture and tone.

I like to rub and scrape the surfaces as I might handle the surface of a sculpture.’ In contrast to her use of flat, opaque colour in drawings of the forties, Hepworth came to treat oil paint as a palpable, translucent medium. Washes of colour alluded to landscapes veiled in mist or cloud, and loaded, gestural brushstrokes of bright colour evoked the interior or exterior faces of massive, impermeable stone structures. Second, the mass of colour and painterly texture was organised and shaped by lines and arcs drawn with singular precision using a hard, sharp pencil. ‘The surface takes my mood in colour and texture, then a line or a curve made on it has a bite rather like cutting into a slate.’

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Provenance

Gimpel Fils, London
Mrs Keith Wood, July 1965
At Sotheby's, London, 22 June 1994, lot 119
At Hartley's, Ilkley, 22 June 2011, lot 601,
Private Collection
Piano Nobile, London

Literature

Dr Sophie Bowness and Dr Jenna Lundin Aral will include this work in their forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Hepworth's paintings and drawings as D 429.