DAME BARBARA HEPWORTH WAS ONE OF THE GREATEST SCULPTORS and artists of the twentieth century. Unlike her friend and contemporary, Henry Moore – whose sculpture remains close to the human figure – she decided that representation was not the aim of sculpture and she became one of the first British sculptors to make completely non-representational works. Yet, for many, the wraithlike Dame Barbara was the artist who put the hole in modern sculpture, who introduced emptied space as an element in her compositions and made it her signature. The event occurred in 1931, when, in a flash of daring (for which she was renowned) she pierced a hole in a small carving to give the figure a sense of flow and lead the viewer’s eye around it. “When I first pierced a shape, I thought it was a miracle,” she recalled. “A new vision was opened.”
From then on, she carved or
