At the Courtauld Gallery in London, an unexpected portrait of Barbara Hepworth takes shape, an artist known for her pure, silent volumes, yet rarely associated with color. The exhibition explores the artist's desire to bring color to life in sculpture, a little-recognized urge that spans thirty years of her career. On display, approximately twenty sculptures and thirty drawings establish a dialogue between the "pieces with color" of the 1940s and works from the following decades. Standout works in wood and stone from 1940-1946, in which intense blues and yellows emerge within cavities or along sculptural curves, breaking with the traditional austerity of British abstraction. The exhibition invites us to consider how Hepworth transformed light and emptiness into chromatic dimensions: bronze surfaces and colored stones become tools for making sculpture vibrate in a new way. What emerges is a less ascetic and more experimental image of the artist, capable of traversing painting and sculpture while maintaining a rigorous formal coherence. With a finally visible dialogue between works, drawings, and graphics, Hepworth in Colour restores color to the center of her research, not as a decorative detail, but as a living, structural force of plastic thought.
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