Orchid

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Cabinet Office, 70 Whitehall

This work is from a portfolio of 12 prints entitled Opposing Forms. Known primarily for her work as a sculptor, Dame Barbara Hepworth also produced numerous works on paper. Many of the themes and formal characteristics found in her sculptures are echoed in these screenprints.

Curved forms in the prints are particularly reminiscent of aspects of Hepworth’s sculptures, as are the circles – ancient symbols as old as the Cornish stone megaliths that inspired her. It is not always clear in her prints whether the white areas are forms in themselves or voids; the ‘empty’ spaces in her sculptures were arguably as important to her work as the physical matter itself. The curved grid in Winter Solstice echoes the taut strings in many of her sculptural works, which acted as an indicator of tension between forms.

Although superficially abstract, Hepworth also regarded her prints as embodying the different relationships between forms and figures. 

Opposition, particularly between male and female forms, is a recurring theme in her work.

Hepworth communicated about how her gendered position underpinned her work:

I do not believe that women are in competition with men. I believe that they have a sensibility, a perception and a contribution to make which is complementary to the masculine and which completes the total experience of life. … [a] whole range of formal perception belonging to feminine experience.

Barbara Hepworth was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, and studied at the Royal College of Art in London. One of Britain’s foremost sculptors, she visited Italy in 1924 to study marble carving. In Paris in 1933 she joined Abstraction-Création, an international exhibition society. Her work moved into an abstract phase, and with husband Ben Nicholson and others, she was at the forefront of the modern movement. At the outbreak of the war she moved with Nicholson to Cornwall. From 1951, after her marriage dissolved, she lived permanently in St Ives. Retrospectives were held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1952 and 1962, and the Tate in 1968. She was created DBE in 1965. After her tragic death in a fire, her studio was opened as a museum.

Places

Subjects

abstract, St. Ives School, orchid

Materials & Techniques

screenprint

Artist

Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903 - 1975)

Title

Orchid

Portfolio Title

Opposing Forms

Edition

20/60

Date

1970

Medium

Screenprint

Acquisition

Purchased from Marlborough Fine Art, December 1974

Inscription

bl: 20/60 br: Barbara Hepworth

GAC number

11750/9