Modern Conversations

Rebecca Horn, Performances II  1973

Horn designed these ‘body extensions’ for herself and her friends. They limit or expand how a person can move and interact with their environment. These performances were made specifically for the camera. They show how the sculptures change the wearers’ relationship to the surrounding space and to other people. Horn has commented: ‘Looking back at these first pieces you always see a kind of cocoon, which I used to protect myself. Like the fans where I can lock myself in, enclose myself, then open and integrate another person into an intimate ritual. This intimacy of feeling and communication was a central part in the performances.’

Gallery label, May 2019

Naum Gabo, Kinetic Stone Carving  1936–44

When Gabo first set down his ideas on constructive sculpture in his ‘Realistic Manifesto’ in 1920, he dismissed the traditional carving of solid mass. Instead, he asserted sculpture’s description of space through construction. However, in the mid–1930s, he modified this view with a number of carved works in which he sought to convey space through a massive object. In works such as this he used the curling edges to articulate the space around the solid stone from which the work was made.

Gallery label, May 2007

Margaret Mellis, Number Thirty Five  1983

Mellis trained as an artist in Edinburgh and Paris. Between 1939 and 1946 she became part of the community of avant-garde artists living and working in and around St Ives. This included Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, who lived briefly with Mellis and her husband Adrian Stokes in 1939. Impressed by the work of Nicholson and Naum Gabo she became a constructivist. This work comprises pieces of driftwood, including mahogany, pine and plywood, which she collected from the beach at Southwold, where she moved in 1976. Some of the pieces of wood were already painted when found, others were painted by the artist. She refers to her walk on the beach as a hunt and the driftwood collected as her trophies.

Gallery label, August 2004

Keith Vaughan, Ninth Assembly of Figures (Eldorado Banal)  1976

Amedeo Modigliani, Head  c.1911–12

This is one of a series of radically simplified heads with elongated faces and stylised features that Modigliani made between 1911 and 1913. He was inspired by art from countries such as Cambodia, Egypt and Ivory Coast, which he saw in Paris’s ethnography museum. His patron Paul Alexandre recalled how Modigliani worked in this period: ‘When a figure haunted his mind, he would draw feverishly with unbelievable speed… He sculpted the same way. He drew for a long time, then he attacked the block directly.’

Gallery label, January 2019

Denzil Forrester MBE, Cottage Lover  1997

Fahrelnissa Zeid, Untitled  c.1950s

Fahrelnissa Zeid used swirling, crossing lines to paint this abstract artwork. After drawing the lines in pencil, she filled in the shapes made between them with black, green, blue and pink. The result is a complex, kaleidoscopic effect. Zeid made the painting when she was living in London in the 1950s. In 1949 she had taken her first transatlantic flight and was captivated by the abstracted perspective of aerial views. She later translated their scale and feeling into the whirling shapes that appear in this painting. A divisionist effect is achieved, whereby individual patches of colour are built up to create an overall composition.

Gallery label, November 2021

Dame Barbara Hepworth, Drawing for ‘Sculpture with Colour’ (Forms with Colour)  1941

Frances Hodgkins, Loveday and Ann: Two Women with a Basket of Flowers  1915

Frances Hodgkins came to Britain in 1901 from the confined artistic scene of New Zealand. Spending long periods in Cornwall, home to the Newlyn and St Ives Schools, and in Paris, where she taught at the Académie Colarossi, Hodgkins ploughed her own furrow. In typically individualistic style, this portrait combines the mobility of watercolour with the intensity of oil, showcasing the artist's idiosyncratic drawing and quirky sense of colour.

Gallery label, February 2010

Roger Hilton, Untitled  1953

Although abstract, Hilton's work during the early 1950s has an impressionistic quality inspired by Bonnard's garden paintings. In 1953 Hilton's painting changed dramatically. Following a visit to Amsterdam and the Hague, where he was able to study Mondrian's painting, his ideas regarding space, form and colour were revolutionised. He ceased to regard the painting surface as if it was a window. Instead the forms are built up on it, emphasising its flatness. He also greatly simplified his use of shape and colour, restricting himself, as in this painting, to lines and squares in primary colours and black and white. These 'neo-plastic' works eliminate illusion and emphasise the physical, object-like quality of the painting.

Gallery label, August 2004

Nicholas Hlobo, Macaleni Iintozomlambo  2010

In Macaleni iintozomlambo 2010 a tea stain on white watercolour paper forms the basis for the drawing. Meandering tentacles of pale brown are emphasised by intense orange and red stitches and further defined and textured by pale coloured ribbon sutures around the tea stain. The shape resembles an underwater creature, with several of the stitched lines ending abruptly, like stunted limbs. The sexual connotations of the forms, fleshy tones and slippery surfaces found in this work are confirmed by its title. Macaleni iintozomlambo refers to a traditional Xhosa belief whereby boys would throw rocks into the river before diving in naked as a sign of respect towards the river, and in order to acknowledge that they are visitors in a space that is not their own. Hlobo has cut and sewn the paper together with his signature ‘baseball’ stitch, which is not just decorative, but also very strong. The cuts in the paper are sharp and clean, determining where the ribbon sutures will be made and how they will overlap. Hlobo always titles his works in Xhosa, an Nguni language widely spoken in South Africa. Attracted to the formal qualities of the grammar, the sounds of the words, and the linguistic flexibility of Xhosa, Hlobo’s use of the language, with all its poetic idioms, proverbs, and double entendres, is as much about defining himself as it is an effort to convey difficult truths and encourage dialogue around homosexuality, male circumcision and other culturally sensitive issues.

Rebecca Horn, Unicorn  1968–9

Patrick Heron, Harbour Window with Two Figures : St Ives : July 1950  1950

Stephen Partridge, Monitor  1974

Monitor is one of the early defining works of video art in Britain, revealing the structural possibilities the medium offered to artists. For Partridge it is a pure exploration of its working process. A 1973 Sony monitor is recorded close up by a camera, the hardware becoming the subject of the video. Thecamera, linked to the monitor it is filming, creates in the monitor an infinite succession of repeated images of itself. The artist’s hands are seen to turn the monitor to the right through 90 degrees, challenging the physical restrictions of the monitor by becoming physically involved with repositioning it.

Gallery label, September 2016

Karl Weschke, Pillar of Smoke  1964

Weschke arrived in Britain as a German prisoner of war and went on to spend forty years living in Cornwall. This painting, based on the burning of the gorse on the moorland above the town of Zennor, shows smoke rising in a threatening, anthropomorphic mass. Painted at the height of the Vietnam War, it evokes the barbarism suffered by successive generations. Weschke drew on his own memories of the Second World War, when the landscape would smoke for days after battle, while his image also suggests the bombing of Dresden and the burning of bodies in the death camps.

Gallery label, March 2024

Margaret Mellis, Sobranie Collage  1942

Peter Lanyon, White Track  1939–40

Bryan Wynter, Green Confluence  1974

Sir Terry Frost, Winter 1956, Yorkshire  1956

Frost's move from St Ives to Leeds in Yorkshire introduced him to a new landscape. In the Yorkshire Dales he felt like a tiny presence in a huge expanse of space.

He related this unusually long, thin work to a particular experience: tobogganing with friends down a steep hill in Leeds, quite out of control. He said the black form at the top left derived from a Russian hat worn by his friend; the long sweep of the lines evokes his experience of careering down the hill.

Gallery label, September 2004

Alfred Wallis, P.Z. 11  c.1928

Alfred Wallis was a seaman, ice cream seller and rag-and-bone man before he took up painting in old age. He said he painted ‘what used to be’ and many of his works depict a remembered past.In 1928 he met professional artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, for whom Wallis’s work represented an instinctive and naïve folk art. As such, Wallis seemed to belong to the tradition of rustic characters common in literature, and represented a link to an apparently timeless English culture.

Gallery label, July 2007

John Wells, Relief Construction  1941

Roger Hilton, Oi Yoi Yoi  1963

In the early 1960s, Hilton’s art could be figurative or abstract but it always had an erotic charge. This is, perhaps, the most literal description of a situation in his art of that time. He once stated that ‘there are situations, states of mind, moods, etc., which call for some artistic expression’. He gave the source of the painting - ‘my wife dancing on a verandah, we were having a quarrel. She was nude and angry at the time and she was dancing up and down shouting oi yoi yoi – but it is more universal than that.’

Gallery label, September 2016

Patrick Heron, Horizontal Stripe Painting : November 1957 - January 1958  1957–8

Heron was a critic and painter who championed an approach to painting that assessed quality according to such formal values as the flatness of a composition and colour. Of his stripe paintings he wrote, ‘The reason why the stripes sufficed ... was precisely that they were so very uncomplicated as shapes ... the emptier the general format was, the more exclusive the concentration upon the experiences of colour itself.’ Heron resisted the total abandoning of subject matter and even such works as this have been seen in relation to landscape, the horizontal bands and colours perhaps suggesting the horizon at sunset.

Gallery label, February 2010

Sir Terry Frost, Green, Black and White Movement  1951

Dame Barbara Hepworth, Maquette, Three Forms in Echelon  1961

Denis Mitchell, Praze  1964

Denis Mitchell moved to Cornwall in 1930. He played an important role in the artistic development of St Ives following the Second World War. He was a founder member of the Penwith Society and was an assistant to Barbara Hepworth from 1949-59, working on many of her sculptures. In 1959 he began to make abstract sculptures in bronze using a local sand-casting foundry. Simple shapes can be cast by this method and the casts were initially rough, enabling him to use his manual skills to perfect and purify the surfaces. 'Praze' is a fine example of his streamlined single sculptural forms. It is a variation on a theme that he had begun to develop some years earlier. The title, 'Praze' is a Cornish place name.

Gallery label, August 2004

Jesus Rafael Soto, Horizontal Movement  1963

As the spectator passes this work, an optical effect causes the background of black and white lines to vibrate and flicker. Soto described Horizontal Movement as ‘one of the first truly mobile works that I had made’, referring to the addition of an iron rod that hangs in front of the lines. As in all his works the background lines are drawn by hand.

Gallery label, September 2004

William Scott, White, Sand and Ochre  1960–1

Shortly after he completed this painting, the artist said he hesitated to comment on it, beyond relating it to his other paintings from the same time. He did say, however, that a source of inspiration may have been his strong liking for Egyptian painted art. Although Scott had not visited Egypt at the time, he described a number of his paintings as having Egyptian references and titled some of them accordingly. While this work is obviously related to the earlier 'Ochre Still Life', also on view in this gallery, its shapes are even more flattened out and abstract and the surface texture resembles a plastered wall.

Gallery label, September 2004

Victor Pasmore, Abstract in White, Black, Indian and Lilac  1957

Pasmore believed that art derived from nature, and specifically from its underlying processes and structures rather than its surface appearance. In his reliefs Pasmore brought ideas of growth and abstract harmony into three dimensions. He rejected tilted elements because they were not organic developments of the rectangles in the way that horizontals and verticals are. He added: Geometry, though subject to the quoi of personal judgment, is a guide to the organic process.

Gallery label, August 2004

Alfred Wallis, Schooner under the Moon  ?c.1935–6