Glacier Shelf; Composition II

The present work was executed in an industrious and notable year for Barns-Graham. 1951 was the year that Barns-Graham was acclaimed on a public platform as professionally successful. Herbert Read included her in his new book Contemporary British Art, illustrating an oil painting of a glacier, which had been purchased by the British Council in August 1950. She exhibited at the Redfern's Summer group show and the Leicester Galleries Artists of Fame and Promise with the latter, 'eagerly sought as a seal of approval, according to the art historian Margaret Garlake' (see L.Green, W.Barns-Graham - A Studio Life, Hampshire, 2001, p.125).
Furthermore, Barns-Graham had exhibitions with Lefevre Galleries, the Riverside Museum in New York and was one of only eight artists including the two Roberts, MacBryde and Colquhoun, and Ben Nicholson invited to represent Britain at the first Biennale de Peinture de France.
The present work was inspired following the artist's visit to the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland in 1948. In the glacier paintings there is a clear progression towards simplification, 'Earlier in the series complexity in the detailed geometry is matched by an increasing clarification of salient features' (ibid, p.121). The present work has lost this complex detail and has become more solid and sculptural, housing shapes reminiscent of Barbara Hepworth in the mid 1950s.