Literature:

Barbara Hepworth, Alan Bowness, number 454 (plate 174)

The artist's cast was exhibited at Tate, 1968 and is now at the entrance to the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield

This piece was cast in an edition of 7+0 from a slate model, sculpted in the same year (no. 449 in ‘The complete sculpture of Barbara Hepworth 1960-69’ ed. Alan Bowness, Lund Humphries, London 1971)

Since arriving in Carbis Bay, Cornwall as a ‘refugee’ from wartime Hampstead, Barbara Hepworth responded for the rest of her career to the wild, pagan, rock-strewn landscape of west Penwith. While her wartime ‘oeuvre’ limited sculpture, instead developing cosmopolitan constructivism with the crystal drawings and other geometric compositions, Hepworth emerged from the war with the painted spherical wood carving Pelagos investing the purism of the 1930s with oblique, symbolic references to her new environment.The streamlined pierced geometry of Pelagos persisted, re-appearing in Six Forms in a Circle, a medium-sized assembly of roughly rectangular polished bronze members on a dark circular base. The famous holes, while opening the forms to space and light in a plastic synthesis between exterior and interior surfaces, related to the pierced monoliths at Men-an-Tol and at other ancient Penwith sites. Indeed, Alan Wilkinson discusses how Hepworth, “has created a twentieth century visual equivalent of the menhirs and stone circles from prehistoric times.”1  The accommodation of such emotive and timeless anthropological themes within a language of advanced abstraction was an achievement that gave Hepworth’s international aesthetic an individual and culturally site- specific distinction.

1. Alan Wilkinson. ‘Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective’ Tate Liverpool 1994

33.7 x 60 x 60 cms (13.24 x 23.58 in)
P.O.A.