Barbara Hepworth’s Color Studies Take Center Stage at the Courtauld Gallery
A sculpture once at risk of leaving Britain is now anchoring a major London exhibition. At the Courtauld Gallery, “Hepworth in Color” places Barbara Hepworth’s Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red (1943) at the heart of the first exhibition ever devoted to the artist’s relationship with color.
The work’s path to the gallery was itself a public act of preservation. Nearly 3,000 British art lovers and U.K. cultural funds raised £3.8 million ($5.1 million) to acquire the sculpture for the nation after it was sold at Christie’s London in March 2024. The Hepworth Wakefield museum helped secure the piece, with support from Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, underscoring the degree to which Hepworth remains central to Britain’s modern art story.
The exhibition gathers 20 sculptures and 30 drawings from around the U.K. and beyond, offering a fuller view of how color shaped Hepworth’s practice across wartime and after. Six progressively larger versions of Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red are shown together for the first time at the Courtauld, a rare opportunity to see the artist testing variation through scale, hue, and structure.
Hepworth’s move from London to St. Ives, Cornwall, in 1939, with her three young children, marked a decisive shift in her work. The rugged coastline, Atlantic light, and muted coastal tones entered her sculpture and drawings, alongside the practical constraints of wartime life. Rationing, childcare, and limited materials did not halt her experimentation; they sharpened it. Works such as Eidos (1947), Eos (1946), Wave (1943-44), Pelagos (1946), and Curved Form with Green (1943) show how she translated landscape into form without reducing it to illustration.
The exhibition also makes clear that Hepworth’s thinking often began on paper. Her colored drawings, marked by blue, green, red, and yellow, reveal a sustained inquiry into the relationship between line, volume, and atmosphere. As the gallery presents it, color was not an accessory to her sculpture but one of its governing ideas.
“Hepworth in Color” is on view at the Courtauld Gallery in London from June 12 to September 6, 2026.
