Our past exhibitions

To mark The Hepworth Wakefield’s 10th anniversary, the largest exhibition of Barbara Hepworth’s work since the artist’s death in 1975.

This new display presents contemporary artworks that have been acquired for Wakefield since The Hepworth Wakefield opened in 2011.

This exhibition provides a survey of Hepworth’s extraordinary career, from early wood carvings to iconic stringed sculptures and polished bronzes from the 1970s.

This new display will explore how artists working in 1930s Britain turned to abstraction in order to evolve a universal language of art that could engage any viewer. Work by contemporary artists including Bridget Riley and a new acquisition by Cerith Wyn Evans reveal the enduring nature of abstraction as a universal language over time and in changing contexts.

Wakefield’s art collection was established in the 1920s to nurture a public understanding of contemporary art and its relation to modern life – a collecting principle still followed by The Hepworth Wakefield today. This exhibition will demonstrate how the collection has been strategically developed over nearly 10 years since The Hepworth Wakefield opened.

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The works on display in this exhibition have been selected from Wakefield's art collection to reveal the wide variety of materials artists have used to express sculptural ideas – through abstraction and figuration, and from the early twentieth century up to the present day. 

The Hepworth Wakefield will present the first solo exhibition in a European museum by American artist Christina Quarles.

This major new exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield will bring together around 45 paintings and works on paper by Alan Davie and David Hockney, many of which have not been seen publicly for decades.