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Lot Essay
Dr. Sophie Bowness will include this work in her forthcoming revised Hepworth catalogue raisonné under the catalogue number BH 467.
Many works among Hepworth’s multiple-piece sculptures comprise several related upright forms that share a common base. Hepworth had long been interested in the superimposition of elements; the use of disparate shapes connected to create totemic-like forms featured heavily in her work from the 1960s and took on a greater complexity of arrangement and composition. In the last decade of Hepworth’s career, she concentrated on the standing form, two forms, and the closed form but would continue to adapt her work based on innovations from unexpected sources. Regarding her specific inspiration for Six Forms (2 x 3), Hepworth explained the work in terms of a landscape, describing “how the angles at which the pieces are set, and the patterning on the bronze itself, were related to the experience of a boat-trip in the Scilly isles, off the coast of Cornwall, and in particular the swirling motion of going round and round in a boat” (quoted in M. Gale and C. Stephens, op. cit., p. 246).
Predominantly a carver in her early years, Hepworth enjoyed working with rigid materials with her own hands. Following the successful example of her good friend Henry Moore, Hepworth began during the late 1950s to have works cast in bronze. She quickly discovered that the versatility and strength of this medium would considerably broaden the possibilities in the range of her sculptural motifs and, indeed, create more complex multi-form sculptures. During the 1960s Hepworth increasingly merged the organically derived and primitive configuration of her earlier carved sculpture with more geometric, architecturally conceived forms, as an evolutionary process in her themes, and in part an acknowledgement of the architectural spaces in which they might be situated and viewed.
Regarding the present work and its creation, Alan G. Wilkinson explains “The 1968 Six Forms (2 x 3) not only announces the proliferation of forms found in a number of works from the late period, but also the vertical stacking and balancing of two or more forms—a reinterpretation of one of the major themes of Brancusi’s sculpture” (in Barbara Hepworth, Sculptures from the Estate, exh. cat., Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York, 1996, p. 30).
Many works among Hepworth’s multiple-piece sculptures comprise several related upright forms that share a common base. Hepworth had long been interested in the superimposition of elements; the use of disparate shapes connected to create totemic-like forms featured heavily in her work from the 1960s and took on a greater complexity of arrangement and composition. In the last decade of Hepworth’s career, she concentrated on the standing form, two forms, and the closed form but would continue to adapt her work based on innovations from unexpected sources. Regarding her specific inspiration for Six Forms (2 x 3), Hepworth explained the work in terms of a landscape, describing “how the angles at which the pieces are set, and the patterning on the bronze itself, were related to the experience of a boat-trip in the Scilly isles, off the coast of Cornwall, and in particular the swirling motion of going round and round in a boat” (quoted in M. Gale and C. Stephens, op. cit., p. 246).
Predominantly a carver in her early years, Hepworth enjoyed working with rigid materials with her own hands. Following the successful example of her good friend Henry Moore, Hepworth began during the late 1950s to have works cast in bronze. She quickly discovered that the versatility and strength of this medium would considerably broaden the possibilities in the range of her sculptural motifs and, indeed, create more complex multi-form sculptures. During the 1960s Hepworth increasingly merged the organically derived and primitive configuration of her earlier carved sculpture with more geometric, architecturally conceived forms, as an evolutionary process in her themes, and in part an acknowledgement of the architectural spaces in which they might be situated and viewed.
Regarding the present work and its creation, Alan G. Wilkinson explains “The 1968 Six Forms (2 x 3) not only announces the proliferation of forms found in a number of works from the late period, but also the vertical stacking and balancing of two or more forms—a reinterpretation of one of the major themes of Brancusi’s sculpture” (in Barbara Hepworth, Sculptures from the Estate, exh. cat., Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York, 1996, p. 30).