Tate St. Ives has opened a new gallery space after 18 months of closure and a 4-year project. British sculptor Rebecca Warren RA was the chosen artist to inaugurate the revamped exhibition space with All That Heaven Allows, a nod to Douglas Sirk’s film from 1955. I ventured into Cornwall after a 6h drive from London and a scant to-do list.
Rebecca Warren (b. 1965, London) is well known for her rotund clay and bronze female figures as well as her light-hearted approach. The works on show give us an insight into Warren’s more abstract work, hinting at a formal and conceptual collage of ideas. Macho art history references are bundled with mainstream cartoonish notes. A playful convergence of materials and textures brings monumentality and lightness, the rough and sleek, together. The rational balance of some sculptures contraposes incongruent ratios of blobiness on top of slender bases in others. Colour is used to accentuate immateriality, to complicate our reading of bronze and clay surfaces and to add just that touch of fun.
A turn of a corner away from Tate is the studio and sculpture garden of Barbara Hepworth (1903 – 1975, Wakefield – St. Ives). This is a must visit considering that, together with her husband and painter Ben Nicholson, the artist established an artistic community for British and international modernism until her death in 1975. The textured carvings in Hepworth’s studio and garden are a meditative reflection on the landscape and her deep understanding of the natural materials she worked on.
Rebecca Warren, All That Heaven Allows, Tate St. Ives
Barbara Hepworth, Studio and Sculpture Garden Museum
…and a fisherman
Rebecca Warren, All That Heaven Allows, at Tate St Ives, 14 October-7 January 2018.
Barbara Hepworth’s studio and sculpture garden is open until 29 October. It will reopen in Spring 2018 after refurbishment works.
All images © Marina Ribera Iñigo
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