The Hepworth Wakefield announces forthcoming programme for 2019

Kenyan-born Magdalene Odundo OBE is one of the world’s most esteemed ceramic artists. This major exhibition will bring together more than 50 of Odundo’s vessels alongside a large selection of historic and contemporary objects which she has chosen to reveal the vast range of references from around the globe that have informed the development of her unique work.

Designed by architect Farshid Moussavi OBE, the exhibition will be a dynamic journey through these diverse inspirations. On display will be British studio pottery; ancient vessels from Greece and Egypt; historic ceramics from Africa, Asia and Central America; ritual objects from across the African continent; Elizabethan dress and textiles; as well as sculptures by artists including Edgar Degas, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Auguste Rodin who have influenced Odundo’s art. The exhibition is organised in partnership with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.

Yorkshire Sculpture International, the UK’s largest event exploring sculpture, is a collaboration between the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds Art Gallery, The Hepworth Wakefield and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It will feature work by international artists across the four venues and major new outdoor sculpture commissions in Leeds and Wakefield. The Hepworth Wakefield will stage a series of new commissions and debut UK presentations by established and emerging artists from around the world.

For the first time, all of the gallery’s public spaces will be used, with the exhibition unfolding as a series of encounters across the whole building, interacting with Wakefield’s remarkable collection of modern British art. It will bring together artists of different generations who share with both Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore an intense interest in harnessing the cultural histories and physical properties of the materials they use – from an expansive installation by German sculptor Wolfgang Laib to new work by Jamaican-Canadian artist Tau Lewis.

In 1958 Alan Davie had his first solo exhibition at Wakefield Art Gallery, which went on to tour nationally and launched Davie’s career. A young attendee at the Wakefield exhibition was David Hockney, then a student at Bradford College of Art. The exhibition was a pivotal influence on Hockney’s artistic development and shortly after this visit, Hockney moved to London to take up a place at the Royal College of Art. Here he discarded, as Davie had, realist figurative painting in favour of colourful, gestural works that combined abstraction with coded text and symbolism.

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. It will trace the parallel paths of these key figures of post-war British painting, revealing creative convergences and shared themes of passion, poetry and love as their works of art evolved from figuration to abstraction. Set within the context of 1960s counterculture and the popularisation of art through diverse new forms of media, the exhibition will present an exciting moment in British art and the emergence of a radical new art world.

This will serve as the first solo exhibition in a European museum by American artist Christina Quarles. Quarles’ paintings capture bodies in varying states of abstraction, framed by architectural devices that create ever-shifting spaces. Occasional fragments of text in earlier paintings and recent drawings reveal some of the literary, musical and autobiographical references that underpin her work. They also draw parallels with the use of textual fragments in the early paintings of David Hockney, displayed in the concurrent exhibition, We Two Boys: Early Works by Alan Davie & David Hockney.

Quarles, a queer artist with Black ancestry who is often mistaken for being white, deploys this ambiguity to explore fluidities in identity, and create images that disrupt the hetero-normative, male and predominantly-white history of painting.

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This exhibition of photographs by leading British photographers such as Shirley Baker, Bill Brandt, Anna Fox, Chris Killip, Martin Parr and Tony Ray-Jones explores the evolving relationship with the natural world and how this shapes individuals and communities.

Drawn from the photography collection of Claire and James Hyman, Modern Nature includes 60 photographs taken since the end of the Second World War, through the beginnings of de-industrialisation to the present day.