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Viewing Magic in this Country: Hepworth, Moore and the Land 

This brilliant exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield unites two titans of 20th-century art: Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Why? Because both artists grew up in Yorkshire and claimed the landscape as a formative artistic influence.

Taking inspiration from the rugged coastline of Cornwall, where she moved from London following the outbreak of the Second World War, Hepworth carved smooth, undulating forms that echoed the natural world. Some of her works are even titled after specific places she visited, such as Mincarlo, a bay off the Isles of Scilly. Indeed, Hepworth was so struck by the beauty, light and open spaces of Cornwall that she wrote in 1952, ‘there must be magic in this country around here.’

Moore was more interested in exploring the affinity between human beings and the landscape. So, it’s hardly surprising that a visit to Stonehenge in 1921, when he was a student at the Royal College of Art in London, had such a formative impact on his practice. So much so, in fact, that he created a series of detailed lithographs of the stones some 50 years later.

Shown alongside works by Hepworth and Moore are contemporary works by Emii Alrai and Ro Robertson, who are inspired by Yorkshire and Cornish landscapes respectively. Book your train tickets now!

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Dates
20 January 2023

Viewing Antoni Tàpies

Born in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, Antoni Tàpies gained celebrity in the late 1940s for his richly symbolic paintings influenced by French symbolism. But he abandoned this style in the mid-1950s to forge his own visual language of abstraction, underpinned by the reoccurring use of windows, crosses and triangles, as well as unorthodox art materials such as dust, clay and string.

In celebration of the late artist’s 100th birthday, Timothy Taylor presents a solo exhibition of Tàpies’s paintings, object-based assemblages and works on paper, dating from 1989 to 2008, that explore spiritual decay and rebirth. Highlights include Matriu (1991), in which a cross symbol submerges a white canvas in graffiti spray-like black paint, and Ona-Mar (2006), an etched silkscreen which resembles a newspaper scribbled with codes, suggesting a world of hidden protest – repressed, clandestine, but full of life.

Shown together, they reveal an artist grappling with the emptiness unleashed by the post-war period in Europe. Tackling social, political and spiritual issues that resonate today, it’s little wonder his work continues to influence contemporary artists engaging with life, death and the complex of events of history. Make haste.

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Dates
19 January 2023 — 04 March 2023

Viewing SENSE: Beuys/ Gormley — A Conversation through drawing

Now’s your chance to see drawings by the prominent post-war artist Joseph Beuys alongside those by Antony Gormley. Curated by Gormley and installed across the Ropac’s Chapel Gallery in London, SENSE explores the artists’ shared ground — namely a joint interest in reconceptualising human relations with the natural world, social networks and the built environment.

For Beuys, the physical process of drawing was an essential means through which to crystalise his thoughts. In turn, Gormley describes ‘the act of drawing as a form of tuning.’ For him, as for Beuys, it is conceived as ‘a necessary daily activity in which thought is made physical and grounded.’ As you meander around the gallery, stop before three of Beuys’s four Movement Rhythm works from 1962. These three drawings are allied with two by Gormley, Set III and Search III, that ‘acknowledge the grid as the trellis of modernity and the body as a zone of becoming.’

It’s a rare opportunity to see the fundamental role of drawing to both artists’ practices, as well as their shared influences and distinctive vision. Run don’t walk.

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Dates
19 January 2023 — 22 March 2023
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