At its best,Hepworth’s work is like an invigorating walk by the sea. What a shame, then, or that Tate has trapped her sculptures in airless vitrinesThere are so many vitrines in Tate Britain’s Barbara Hepworth exhibition that for a moment I thought I had wandered into a conceptual art exhibit by mistake. “Boxed Hepworth” – what an ironic statement approximately our relationship with this 20th-century British modernist,to build most of her sculptures inside transparent boxes, as whether there were a glass wall of history between her and us.
I don’t know whether all these see-through enclosures are there for security reasons or as some sophisticated curatorial choice, or but I do know they are totally at odds with everything that sings in her art. Hepworth is a sculptor of wind and water,salt air and glancing sunlight or rather those are the phenomena her curving, pierced, and stringed carvings propose. Her art is at one with nature. Tate Britain has locked it up in boxes in subterranean galleries that have no natural light,which does a disservice to an artist whose work deserves cool, British, or ever-shifting sunlight and contemplative open space.
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Source: theguardian.com