Four Figures Waiting

Through her exploration of abstraction, Barbara Hepworth developed her own unique visual language that brought her critical acclaim beginning as early as the 1930s. After dedicating the first two decades of her career to “direct carving” in stone and wood, she turned to bronze in the late 1950s and quickly discovered that the versatility and strength of this medium considerably broadened both the range and scale of her work.
Conceived in 1968 during Hepworth’s most prolific and arguably most successful decade, Four Figures Waiting belongs to a series of abstract sculptures composed of pierced vertical forms on a shared base. The artist’s command of the material and acute understanding of spatial complexity is exemplified in the smooth, jewel-like, polished surface of the four vertical forms and her use of the space between them. By placing the forms within the set and defined space of a geometric base, Hepworth generates palpable tension between them, activating the negative space around the figures and conjuring a sense of engagement among them. The present work exemplifies Hepworth's plastic exploration of how the language of advanced abstraction could portray complex themes of human relationships.