Visit Barbara Hepworth in Colour at the Courtauld, London, Before It Ends on 6 September

I'll admit I went into Hepworth in Colour expecting the version of Barbara Hepworth most of us carry around: cool, poised, all smooth curves and quiet holes carved out of stone. What I didn't expect was to spend most of the visit looking at paint.

The Courtauld's small, focused show – officially The Joseph Hage Aaronson & Bremen Exhibition: Hepworth in Colour – is the first ever dedicated to Hepworth's use of colour, and it genuinely changes how the sculptures sit in the room. A curve that would normally read as calm suddenly has a pulse. A hollow interior painted pale blue stops being just a hollow and starts feeling like it's holding something.

A Different Side of an Artist You Think You Know

Hepworth is so tied to Cornwall – to St Ives, the sea, the wind, the light – that it's easy to file her work away as a single mood. This exhibition doesn't argue with that association, but it complicates it nicely. Around twenty sculptures and thirty works on paper trace how colour crept into her practice from the 1930s onward, often through the same strings and painted interiors that later became her signature.

The show is curated by Dr Alexandra Gerstein, the Courtauld's curator of sculpture and decorative arts, and Hepworth specialist Dr Stephen Feeke, and there's a real sense of a specific argument being made rather than a greatest-hits survey. The wall texts are worth actually reading here, which isn't something I say often.

The Strings Are the Whole Point

The piece that stopped me longest was Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form), Pale Blue and Red – painted wood strung with taut lines, in the pale blue Hepworth always associated with the Cornish sky and sea. It's on loan from The Hepworth Wakefield, and this is its first time back in London since it was acquired for the nation, so it's genuinely a rare chance to see it up close. Hepworth once described the strings in these early works as ‘the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hill’, and standing in front of it, that tension is physical. The paint doesn't just decorate the wood. It changes what the strings seem to be pulling against.

Get Close, Then Get Closer

The best way to see this show is slowly. From across the room, a piece might read as a single elegant shape. Up close, the decisions start showing: where the colour stops and the bare wood begins, how a painted interior catches light differently depending on where you're standing, how much warmer a form feels once there's a flash of red inside it instead of nothing. One small oval piece, painted and impossibly smooth, kept drawing me back – less like sculpture and more like something you'd want to hold.

Look for the pierced forms too. The holes in Hepworth's work are as considered as the solid parts, and colour changes what they do – a plain hollow reads as absence, but paint turns the same hollow into something closer to a held breath.

Make It a Somerset House Afternoon

Part of what makes this show work is the room it's in. The Courtauld sits inside Somerset House, and getting there means climbing the same worn spiral staircase generations of students and visitors have used for decades – a nice bit of theatre before you've even reached the gallery. The exhibition itself is compact, spread across two rooms, so it's an easy show to fit into a free afternoon without it swallowing your whole day.

Afterwards, it's worth wandering into the Courtauld's permanent collection if you have the time – moving from Hepworth's mid-century abstraction into the older paintings upstairs makes both feel a little different by contrast.

Hepworth in Colour runs until 6 September 2026, so there isn't much runway left. If you think you already know her work, this is worth an hour of your time to be proven only half right.

📍 Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

📆 Hepworth in Colour is on until 6 September 2026.

⏰ Opening hours: 10 am – 6 pm daily (last entry 5:15 pm).

🎫 Tickets from £18, including entry to the Permanent Collection. Courtauld members and under-18s go free.

🚇 The closest Tube stations are Temple (District and Circle lines) and Covent Garden (Piccadilly line).