An oval sculpture by the late English artist Dame Barbara Hepworth could sell for up to £3.2 million, or more than $4 million, at a Christie's London auction next week Wednesday, March 20.
Dubbed "Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red," the piece will go under the hammer in the auction house's "Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale" with a low estimate of around £2.2 million, or $2.8 million.
Other works by Hepworth are also going on sale in the forthcoming auction, including her "Maquette for Winged Figure," "Atlantic Form, Blue," and "Landscape Sculpture (1944)," with the former two estimated to fetch between £100,000 ($127,000) to £180,000 ($229,000) and the latter valued at a million pounds ($1.27 million) at the high end.
Barbara Hepworth's Oval Sculpture, 'Among the Artist's Finest Works'
In Christie's lot essay of the oval-shaped Hepworth piece, the auction house described it as a standout among Hepworth's amazing "series of hand-carved wooden sculptures" she crafted in the mid-1940s, adding that it is currently regarded as "among her finest works."
The particular collection the oval sculpture belonged in was the result of Hepworth's decade of pioneering fusions using the core constructivist principles in the 1930s that she incorporated with her recently realized sensibilities toward local landscapes at the time.
Joining "Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red" in this group of pieces is her 1943 "Oval Sculpture," currently held at the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness; her 1943 "Wave, held at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburg; and her 1946 "Pelagos, held at London's Tate Museum.
Hepworth began sculpting the wood-based art piece as soon as she moved into her house in Cabis Bay's Chy an Kerris apartment in Cornwall, UK in 1943.
Of this process, Christie's quoted Hepworth in the essay saying: "There was a sudden release from what had seemed to be an almost unbearable diminution of space and now I had a studio workroom looking straight towards the horizon of the sea and enfolded (but with always the escape for the eye straight out to the Atlantic) by the arms of land to the left and the right of me."
According to the auction house, this "enfolding" element of her new Carbis Bay home's surrounding landscape is what informed the collection that would be inaugurated with the creation of "Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red."
"I used colour and strings in many of the carvings of this time," said Hepworth, as quoted by Christie's. "The colour in the concavities plunged me into the depth of water, caves, or shadows deeper than the carved concavities themselves."
"The strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills," she added.
For more information about the ensuing sale of the Hepworth piece, click here.
