Barbara Hepworth at the Art Gallery of Ontario - Toronto, Ontario - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Critical writing about the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) has repeatedly concentrated upon her debt to the male artists near and dear to her - Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo in particular. This retrospective, co-organized by dint of the AGO, the Liverpool Tate and the Yale Center for British Art and the first since 1968 consisted of 66 carvings and and zincs and 28 drawings. The greatest in quantity arresting note was struck by means of works that illustrate Hepworth's continue lengthen in timeed explorations of the relationship between human figures and natural/archeological sites. In laying down a foundation for later exploration of the body, her contribution is distinguished by means of an approach that is antipolemical, ungender abstract.

Many of the small plastic arts combine intimations of body change with allusions to the motion with allusions to the Cornish seaside where Hepworth lived from 1939 until her death in a studio fire. Small Form Resting (1945) consists of a slightly empty with a scooped thin ovoid of marble upon which sits a softly sculpt sphere with a concave face. This figure reposes on its ground, joyous and stable. single of the most active and ambiguous of these body-and-landscape relationships present itselfs in Pelagos (1946). This work is an lay open shell-like wood sphere lined with a impressible blue wash, its sides held toward each other by dint of colored strings. Here an implied wave motion - a faculty of perception of recoiling, rolling forward and resting - coexists with an allusion to a narcissistic figure, shakeed inward by the strings to admire itself; this in revolve is countered by the other side of the plastic art where the curvature suggests a two embracing.

Paired forms, to which Hepworth devot a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of attention, convey through their sensuousness and positioning many of the warring, loving or jarring emotions humans are lying flat to. Two Rotating Forms (1966) in a creamy alabaster that appears sun-drenched, are marvelous individually; together they appear to be to express conflict Two Opposing Forms (Grey and Green) (1969) reminders of Celtic menhirs, address each other vehemently. in sum of two units Figures (1943) - both richly polished redwood obelisks - the taller relates to the other in clearly male/female relationship.

Among Hepworth's vertical statuarys combining aspects of humans and menhirs, Churinga (1952) is outstanding. Its burnished Spanish mahogany has a fleshlike sensuousness, the grain consummately outlining the form of a hollowed-out female figure.

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