home of the free because of the brave metal sculpture

Hepworth's first 'piercing' of a figurative sculpture of her own came after apparently misunderstanding the description in a review of Moore's work. Hepworth's idea of a pierced form was taken up immediately by Henry Moore, her friend and rival, and would inform the practice of both artists for years to come. The work makes manifest the fundamental underlying principle of carving that form and volume are created by taking away material, not adding it, distinguishing it from almost every other art form. The viewer becomes aware of the volume of empty space, and the powerful resonance this can create. For the first time, Hepworth's work is concerned with a manifestation of absence rather than presence. Its dominant feature is a hole in the center of the sculpture. It remains an important work nonetheless. One of Hepworth's earliest near-abstract works - moving far afield from the much more figurative modes of Brancusi's strong influence on her - was a piece destroyed in the German bombing of London in WWII, while Hepworth was living in Cornwall.

Though her forms in their larger outlines tended to possess the clean lines of modernist aesthetics, she complicated these with different textures, an effect described by one reviewer as 'sensuous and tactile' that 'quickened the pulse'. This included the use of a wide range of physical materials for sculpting and an unprecedented sensitivity to the particular qualities of those materials in helping decide the ultimate results of her sculptures, the investigation of 'absence' in sculpture as much as 'presence,' and deep considerations of the relationship of her sculptural forms to the larger spaces surrounding it. Her development of sculptural vocabularies and ideas was complex and multi-faceted. She evolved her ideas and her work as an influential part of an ongoing conversation with many other important artists of her time, working crucially in areas of greater abstraction while creating three dimensional objects. Barbara Hepworth distinguished herself as a world-recognized sculptor in a period where female artists were rare.

Home of the free because of the brave metal sculpture