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拍品专文
"Carving is interrelated masses conveying an emotion; a perfect relationship between the mind and the colour, light and weight which is the stone, made by the hand which feels. It must be so essentially sculpture that it can exist in no other way, something completely the right size but which has growth, something still and yet having movement, so very quiet and yet with a real vitality." Quoted in The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture, Herbert Read, ed., London, 1934, p. 19.
The present sculpture is an elegant example of Hepworth’s sensitivity and her prowess as a sculptor. Geometric yet organic, Two Small Forms, carved in 1946, is emblematic of the artist’s empathetic approach to material. From the earliest stages of her career, Hepworth held a deeply rooted passion for carving, a technique she had discovered during an extended sojourn to Italy as a young student in the 1920s. She often expressed her enjoyment of the physical process of the technique, the rhythms and motions that occurred in the act of cutting into and shaping the material with her own hands–even the sounds of the stone or wood as it yielded to her tools. She believed that working directly with the material, connected to it in this way, allowed for an intimate relationship with the medium and a deeper understanding of its unique personality.
Here, Hepworth was conscious of alabaster’s ever-changing appearance, a contributing factor in creating balance and harmony: sometimes warm and translucent and at other times cold and opaque. Like a living body, this unique stone manifests itself in many guises under different atmospheric conditions. Although the two present forms can be thought of as pure abstraction, their materiality and inevitable dialogue with one another imbues them with the vitality of figures–a tension instinctively explored by sculptors, from anonymous Cycladic artists as early as 3000 B.C., to modernists such as Constantin Brancusi, whose studio Hepworth had visited on a visit to France in 1933.
The form to the left bends softly, as if reaching out to touch its upright counterpart to the right. Depending on the angle from which the sculpture is looked at, through an optical illusion, it can be thought of as succeeding, and the pair united in space if only briefly.
Kindly note that this work was gifted to E.R.F Cole in 1952 by the University of Liverpool, where he worked in the Architecture department.
The present sculpture is an elegant example of Hepworth’s sensitivity and her prowess as a sculptor. Geometric yet organic, Two Small Forms, carved in 1946, is emblematic of the artist’s empathetic approach to material. From the earliest stages of her career, Hepworth held a deeply rooted passion for carving, a technique she had discovered during an extended sojourn to Italy as a young student in the 1920s. She often expressed her enjoyment of the physical process of the technique, the rhythms and motions that occurred in the act of cutting into and shaping the material with her own hands–even the sounds of the stone or wood as it yielded to her tools. She believed that working directly with the material, connected to it in this way, allowed for an intimate relationship with the medium and a deeper understanding of its unique personality.
Here, Hepworth was conscious of alabaster’s ever-changing appearance, a contributing factor in creating balance and harmony: sometimes warm and translucent and at other times cold and opaque. Like a living body, this unique stone manifests itself in many guises under different atmospheric conditions. Although the two present forms can be thought of as pure abstraction, their materiality and inevitable dialogue with one another imbues them with the vitality of figures–a tension instinctively explored by sculptors, from anonymous Cycladic artists as early as 3000 B.C., to modernists such as Constantin Brancusi, whose studio Hepworth had visited on a visit to France in 1933.
The form to the left bends softly, as if reaching out to touch its upright counterpart to the right. Depending on the angle from which the sculpture is looked at, through an optical illusion, it can be thought of as succeeding, and the pair united in space if only briefly.
Kindly note that this work was gifted to E.R.F Cole in 1952 by the University of Liverpool, where he worked in the Architecture department.