The Hepworth Wakefield

The Hepworth Wakefield is Yorkshire’s award-winning gallery and the UK’s largest purpose-built new gallery in over 50 years. It celebrates the achievements of one of Britain’s most significant sculptors, Barbara Hepworth, in the city in which she was born and raised. Barbara Hepworth’s drawings are often eclipsed by her sculpture work but they show a highly skilled draughtsmanship. Hepworth often combined her drawings with paint and described them as ‘sculptures born in the disguise of two dimensions’.​ In her drawings Hepworth creates space, shapes and texture through the use of transparent smooth layers and bold mark-making, sometimes made in parallel with related sculptures. She noted in 1965, ' when I start drawing and painting abstract forms I am really exploring new forms, hollows and tensions which will lead me where I need to go.'