Barbara Hepworth was at the vanguard of modern art - one of the first artists to create completely abstract sculptures, she became a leading figure of the international art scene and one of the few women artists to achieve such prominence.

Born in 1903 in Wakefield, Yorkshire, Hepworth attended Leeds College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London where she studied sculpture alongside artist and friend Henry Moore. During her travels in Italy from 1925 to 1926, she learned to carve marble under Giovanni Ardini, and developed a method of working directly with her chosen material without making preparatory maquettes. In her first major joint exhibition in 1928 at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London – with her husband John Skeaping – she mainly showed stone carvings of animals and figures. As her practice matured, Hepworth eventually committed fully to abstraction in her sculpture.

During visits to Paris from 1933 to 1935, she met with her contemporaries, notably Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp, Joan Miró and Constantin Brânçusi, which brought renewed vigour to her art. These encounters had lasting effects on Hepworth, as her studio became a centre of the abstract art movement in Britain by the late 1930s. As war broke out in 1939, she moved her young family – with second husband Ben Nicholson – to the seaside town of St Ives, Cornwall, where she would stay for the remainder of her life. Lack of materials, insufficient space and the demands of raising small children made it almost impossible for Hepworth to sculpt. During this hiatus, she drew many studies for abstract sculptures and did not resume her practice until 1943. Hepworth became recognized for the use of a signature hole in her sculpture, chiseling increasingly open and hollowed out concave forms in nearly all her abstractions. Inspired by the Cornish scenery and moving away from pure abstraction, her sculptures now contained references to the surrounding landscape. As she studied rock formations, the geometry of seashells and the movement of the tides, man’s harmonious relationship to the natural world became central to her art. In the mid-1950s, she began working with bronze and other metals, which proved to be a liberating experience for Hepworth as she experimented with a new language of sculpture. She cast in small editions, which helped her to meet the international demand for her art.

Hepworth received many significant commissions for public sculptures, including Single Form, which was installed at the United Nations building in New York. Her work is also featured in an extensive array of museum collections such as the Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum; as well as galleries, private and public collections, sculpture parks and gardens worldwide. Accumulating an impressive number of prizes and honorary degrees, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1965, and in the same year was appointed as the first female Trustee of the Tate Gallery.