Yorkshire Sculpture International

The Hepworth Wakefield presented its most ambitious exhibition to date, unfolding as a series of new commissions and debut UK presentations by established and emerging artists across the David Chipperfield-designed gallery spaces.

Centred around the theme of ‘truth to materials’, the exhibition investigated the idea that a sculptural form should be determined by the characteristics of the chosen materials.

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Jimmie Durham

The series of encounters with individual artists began with a display of recent works by Jimmie Durham (b. 1940, USA) positioned in conversation with early sculptures and carvings by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, highlighting how each artist created their work to emphasise the natural properties of raw materials.

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Wolfgang Laib

A major new installation by Wolfgang Laib, who only uses raw natural resources in his work, took over one of The Hepworth Wakefield’s largest galleries. Created with rice and pollen collected by the artist over a number of years from the fields surrounding his home, Laib explores the organic and life-giving qualities of the materials he uses, reflected in his meditative working practices of collecting and installing.

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Nairy Baghramian

Nairy Baghramian displayed works from her Maintainers series, recent sculptures that combine aluminium casts, coloured wax and lacquer painted braces with cork. The resolute materiality of each independent element is seemingly contradicted by the tentative physical relationships between them, which suggest the possibility of continuous rearrangement.

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Tau Lewis

The exhibition included the debut presentation outside of North America of self-taught, Jamaican-Canadian artist, Tau Lewis. A newly commissioned body of work was on display featuring a large-scale collaged textile hanging, forms composed of found objects and soft figurative works with hand-carved plaster faces and feet. By stitching together found objects and materials from different cultures and places, often embedding personal belongings within her sculptures, Lewis explores the black diasporic experience and contemplates the erasure of histories.

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