There she is: the British modernist. The windswept Cornwall studio. The carved holes. The polished stone. The abstract forms that somehow manage to feel both ancient and futuristic, like relics from a civilisation that never existed.
Barbara Hepworth is one of those artists everyone thinks they already understand.
Which is precisely why Hepworth in Colour, the Courtauld's small but revelatory exhibition, feels so unexpectedly fresh. It doesn't introduce us to an unknown artist. It introduces us to the part of a famous artist we've been overlooking for decades.
Art history has largely remembered Hepworth as the sculptor of pure form, celebrating the carved void, the dialogue between mass and space, the sensuality of stone and wood. Colour, meanwhile, became an afterthought—as if it were merely decorative, something added once the "real" artistic decisions had already been made.
The exhibition quietly dismantles that assumption.
Painted blues sink into carved hollows like small fragments of sea trapped inside stone. Sharp yellows catch the light with architectural precision and whites become less a colour than a source of illumination. Looking closely, you realise that Hepworth wasn't colouring sculptures -she was sculpting colour itself.
The exhibition is refreshingly restrained, because it doesn't reveal a different Barbara Hepworth. It reveals how incomplete our version of her had been all along.
Around twenty sculptures are paired with drawings and paintings rather than overwhelmed by endless chronology or biographical explanation. The Courtauld has become unusually good at these focused exhibitions: instead of trying to tell you everything about an artist, they simply change one thing about how you look at them.
12 June – 6 September 2026
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries
