Work and personality

The power of art and music to bring people together and to move them across all borders was not only something that interested Barbara Hepworth throughout her life. Born almost 70 years later, artist Nevin Aladağ (born 1972) takes the transgressive and community-fostering power of music as one of the core themes in her artistic practice. In her installations and performances, she places the focus on the concept of transculturality; musical elements from different cultures meld to form new, indivisible units. Over and above the formal language, Aladağ thus creates an expressive range that addresses all the senses.


For her four-part work series entitled Resonator (2019) she took musical instruments from all over the world and fused them to form collage-like, abstract shapes. The different sounds of the individual instruments combine to form a shared sculptural resounding space. The resulting objects are hybrid, indeed almost utopian, and bear within themselves a broad swathe of expressive potential.² Each of the pieces takes its cue in terms of material and form from a different family of instruments. The gleaming brass sphere of Resonator Wind (2019; pages 111 and 115) is fitted out with wooden and metal parts of all manner of wind instruments, such as flutes, a saxophone, or panpipes. The form itself already appeals to the viewer’s acoustic perception and asks a central question: What does the sculpture sound like?³ Using the mouthpieces that jut out from the metal sound box, the work can be played by several musicians. Taking turns, they fill the Resonator with air and together set it resonating. The resulting sounds combine different directions in music and historical references, opening the work out over the dividing lines of space and time. Curator Rachel Jans characterizes the openness of Aladağ’s works with a view to the physical phenomenon of sound by saying that it “does not adhere to borders; it travels, bounces, and echoes through space and material.”⁴ 


Barbara Hepworth reflected on this timeless and vital quality of music in her art from an early date. Like Aladağ, Hepworth grew up in a musical family, she played various instruments and was friends with composers such as Priaulx Rainier and Michael Tippett.⁵ From the 1950s onwards she also concerned herself with the world of theater, designing stage sets and costumes for plays such as Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage or Sophocles’ Electra (fig. 1).⁶ In her Carvings and Drawings monograph Hepworth emphasizes the relevance that music and dance had for her life and work: “These things are immensely important to me … My home and my children; listening to music, and thinking about its relation to the life of forms, the need for dancing as recreation, and where dancing links with the actual physical rhythm of carving.”⁷ 


The interaction of music and form that Hepworth describes is especially apparent in her 1950s Stringed Sculptures. Thin cotton threads resembling the strings of musical instruments are spanned inside the abstract and organically rounded forms characteristic of her art. Her Orpheus (1965; p. 36) sculpture also references music with its title and the allusions to Greek mythology. With its curved wings the work brings to mind the lyre used by singer and poet Orpheus, who with his musical gift tried to liberate his wife Eurydice from the grasp of the underworld.⁸ In her sculpture, Hepworth structurally combines the flowing, opened shape of the metal wings with a fine network of threads, thus activating all the senses: It is as if one felt the resonation of the strings, the rhythm of the music, and also heard the soft sound of the lyre playing. 


Precisely this sensory experience is something Aladağ lends contemporary expression in her pieces. Her Resonator Strings (2019; pp. 112–3) is a polyphonic sculpture that is composed of elements of different string instruments: taking the wooden sound boxes and strings of an acoustic and a bass guitar, a cello and a zither. The strict geometry and abstraction of the external shape contrast here with the soft material of wood and the organic blend of sounds. Because exactly like Resonator Wind, Resonator Strings can be played by musicians who set the initially static work in movement. Like a mobile caught in the wind and set resonating, Aladağ’s Resonators are brought to life for a fleeting moment by the actions of the musicians. 


In her early video installations, Aladağ had already addressed the issue of how musical instruments could be activated by outside impulses. For example, in her piece Session (2013), which she made in the city and desert setting of the Arab city state Sharjah. There it is not musicians playing the instruments but instead wind, water and gravitation that set them resonating (figs. 2, 3). Sound worlds arise that are directly linked to the atmosphere and occurrences in the surrounding landscape. In her day, Hepworth set similar standards for this interaction of art, music and nature: “I think sculpture grows in the open light and with the movement of the sun its aspect is always changing; and with space and the sky above, it can expand and breathe.”⁹ Both Hepworth and Aladağ forge an immutable symbiosis of abstract sculptural shapes and the rhythm of the surrounding nature. Both artists create a poetic oeuvre that through movement and sound generate an ephemeral and likewise liberated expression. 

In Barbara Hepworth’s personal collection of found objects, which includes pearl shells and Neolithic axe heads, there is also an obsidian blade. Like the rest of the items gathered over the course of a lifetime it could, in the words of one critic, “easily be a Hepworth in miniature” – a palm-sized example of the forms that inspired her own.¹ As a common thread running throughout such items, “attractive smoothness belies something raw and elemental; they look to have been carved not by a human hand but by time.”² The items appear to crystallize the border between objecthood without a (human) purpose, and practical use-value. 
As her oeuvre indicates, this aesthetic zone, located between what the structural anthropologist Levi-Strauss called “the raw and the cooked”,³ and between suggestion and emptiness, establishes especially powerful coordinates for sculptural expression; coordinates that Julian Charrière’s Thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows (2021) also occupies.
It is an oversized shard of obsidian – a black volcanic glass that was formed by rapidly cooling lava. Concave hemi-spheres dot its alternately jagged and flowing exterior – carved out and polished smooth by the artist. But what kind of “tool-being” echoes here? In terms of geometry, the concave hollows recall satellite dishes – and thus the issue of communication across great distances. Yet, while sucking ambient light into the mineral’s hidden center, these perfect depressions are more in scale with hand-sized crystal balls known to the history of magic. In fact, the earliest divinatory crystal balls (such as the one employed by Elizabethan magus Dr. John Dee) were made of obsidian, not crystal. Both materials evoke imaginaries that can be tied to speculative powers and a certain other-worldliness. By bringing together elemental forces, ancient practices, and references to the present day, the total associative complex of Thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows presents itself as oracular.
Beyond Europe, in pre-modern Central and South America, polished obsidian mirrors were key props in spiritual rituals. Tezcatlipoca, a central deity of the Aztec religion, was invoked for prophesy, amongst other things. His name is often translated as “Smoking Mirror” and traces to the black mirrors made of obsidian used for cultic divination in his name. Rather than making things “crystal clear”, the black smoke within the obsidian clouds and alters the world’s reflection – providing the user with no mere picture of what (already) is, but what might also be. As a 21^st century smoking mirror, Charrière’s object also recalls the smartphones display’s obsidian character – crystalline and jet-black. Though not forged in the natural furnace of a Tequila volcano, the iPhone does emanate from a neo-alchemical crucible. It is in such research and development laboratories that, we are told, visionaries operate – willing the future into being. We stare into the black mirrors with which they have equipped us, and which, with their smokescreen, speak riddles and cast spells. In relation to Plato’s allegory of the cave, onscreen content stands in substitution for the unhidden/sun; an illusion, as Saint Paul  diagnoses obscure sight to be in the Epistle to the Corinthians: vision “quasi speculum in aenigmate” – “as in a mirror darkly.”⁴ 
That dark screen (or veil) separates users from its inner workings and the dynamic principle at play within. Qua mirror, the black surface shows a human image (a face) and seems to reflect a familiar world. But the system (wherein we seem reflected) is not an arrangement of colors, human bodies, or emoticons. There is a whole other realm of representation beneath it. Computational languages do not have any color at all. Below the image universe (the surface of the mirror), code has its own cosmos of signs which speak to people as much as minerals and flows of energy. The image on the dark screen is a superficial truth that distracts us.
Mysticism meets the fetish for the commodity and its secret here; a secret embedded in the dark logic of exchange, exploitation, and recombinatory effects – on workers, environments, attention spans, worlds.⁵ The fetish object is everything one wants from a new smartphone. It is a black mirror, offering images even as it circumscribes clear vision. In fact, corporate tech behemoths aim to establish black boxes where, previously, an open system might have arguably offered greater advantages. Keeping things proprietary means stopping the sun from rising over the internal horizon of the device, restricting users to prescribed inputs (e.g. pay as you go), and receiving proscribed outputs. When it comes to computing power, so many tools could do more than what they are marketed for. Initiates know this. To them, what appears cooked, or crystallized, may yet be reformed and rendered liquid again, open to new interpretation or redeployment. Facility with this metabolic power is what separates the contemporary magician – or soothsayer – from their audience.
As the title of another of Charrière’s pieces would have it, beneath it all flows liquid fire.⁶ As a literal volcanic expression – that is, an emanation from the guts of the earth – the object named Thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows encapsulates a sublime metabolic potency that outstrips all human frames. As such, it is an emblematic manifestation of power to remake the world now, and in the future. Between the never-ending churn of magma, only a few kilometers beneath the surface of the earth, and images of life that we must all hold onto – the way things are, and how they should be – there are countless screens. And it is onto such screens that concepts such as purpose and permanence are inscribed. Are they tools, or expressions of the material itself? What are with looking at? What are we looking with?

While born 80 years apart at opposite ends of the twentieth century, the lives and works of artists Claudia Comte and Barbara Hepworth have an uncanny parallel: Both developed a unique style that shifts, renegotiates and questions distinctions between abstraction and figuration. It is characterized by rounded forms and smooth surfaces, a preoccupation with the organic, scale, materiality – notably wood, marble, and bronze. Hepworth’s The Family of Man (1970, fig. 1) and Comte’s The Italian Bunnies (2016, fig 2) are just two examples for work series that similarly form a type of anthropomorphic family – totems that sit between figure and abstracted nature and use repetition, pattern, and variation to create characteristics or even individuality within the abstracted forms. The parallels continue in their countless exhibitions in which both consider how sculptures sit in relation to the often unacknowledged plinth as well as architecture, landscape, public space, and each other. It is little surprise that Comte’s installation in the exhibition which the Lehmbruck Museum dedicates to Hepworth and those she has inspired follows this line of inquiry. Comte’s six sculptures – two cacti, two leaves, and two coral – are made of a single sequoia tree trunk and installed on a floor covered with wooden twigs surrounded by one of the artist’s hallmark wall paintings that use serialization of simple modular forms referencing the formalism of Op Art abstraction. The wall painting, for the first time including newspaper headlines, puts the installation in the context of the climate catastrophe we are facing. Interestingly, Hepworth exhibited her works in 1964 alongside a key contributor to the aforementioned artistic movement, Bridget Riley, in Painting and Sculpture of a Decade, 54–64 at the Tate in London. 


There is a deeper, profound tie that links Comte’s and Hepworth’s practices: the proximity to nature they experienced in childhood. As Hepworth stated, “Perhaps what one wants to say is formed in childhood and the rest of one’s life is spent trying to say it.”¹ The contrast between the busy towns of Yorkshire and the adjacent natural beauty that she would explore with her father would come to define her interest in forms standing in landscape. Comte’s enduring commitment to wood and its carving equally stems from childhood, having grown up in the Swiss countryside at the foothills of the Jura Mountains, in a wooden chalet next to a forest. As the artist notes, “The nature I was surrounded by always really appealed to me and it’s the main thing I want to talk about in my art.”² She explains: “As a child, I was fixated on the patterns made by the wood in the chalet. I was totally hypnotized by the inside of things, particularly by what the natural world could reveal.”³ Both artists, after a stint in various cosmopolitan cities – Hepworth in London, Comte in Berlin – returned to living in nature in their 30s. 


Comte has often cited Hepworth as an inspiration, but some of their similarities lie less in the directness of influence and more in the innate pull toward a relationship with form and material. Take the method of direct carving that defines both artistic practices. Hepworth used the technique considerably from 1929 onward, and moved toward carving with wood. In the spirit of her time, she saw in direct carving a revival of sculptural techniques that the vanguard movement in the UK and US had devoted itself to during the advent of modernity. Hepworth was influenced by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s notion that through the technique of direct carving, the psychological constitution of the artist is brought directly to expression, and that the creative process served to unlock the truth of materials. This wish to understand and explore the tactility or essence of wood clearly interests Comte in her own process of direct carving. First the artist carefully salvages already felled trees from the landscape before carving with a chainsaw and sanding her forms. In doing so she is concerned with a search for truth through a “reduced visual language”.⁴  She also goes beyond or even counters and questions the notion of modernity that reinforced the separation between humans and nature as set out by the Enlightenment. Comte seems more aligned with the philosophy of French Post-structuralist Bruno Latour, who emphatically argues against a continuation of modernity with its defining distinctions between nature and culture, seeing in it the ultimate cause of our problems, notably our climate emergency. This concern, our environmental crisis, is a defining factor of Comte’s work and goes beyond an appreciation or influence of nature.


Hepworth’s biomorphic forms drew on the abstraction of nature, the organic. While often sat within the landscape itself, they were intentionally distinct: a figure or form within nature, not nature itself, as she noted, “a gesture in landscape”.⁵  While Comte can equally be argued to create such biomorphic works within space, in other works there is an active collapsing between art and landscape, between human and nature. Perhaps this is why Comte in 2019 turned her interest to sculpting coral forms, creatures that are at once animate and inanimate, they are animals, but rely on an inseparable partnership with plants to become rock-like forms. Like mushrooms, algae, and even trees, they do not exist as individuals but are rather intertwined, codependent entities that form a whole. Coral is also the most threatened lifeform on this planet while being one that provides the basis for a bountiful ocean biodiversity. Comte has taken this coexistence within her work itself even further, collapsing the distinction between art and nature. In 2019, as part of the Alligator Head Foundation Residency, she created an underwater sculpture park of her carved cacti with the aim for these to be turned back into a part of nature (fig 4). This has worked insofar as corals have now begun to grow on the cacti forms.


Hepworth and Comte have an enduring affinity with our environment, carving according to their material’s essence, working directly within landscape itself, and being concerned with art’s power to relate to nature through an abstract language of forms. While Hepworth lived at a time when this relationship was as much about distinctions as it was about connections, Comte lives in one at which the very distinction itself, to be “out of nature”as Latour called it, is to bear witness to the loss and collapse of our beautiful world.

In her artistic practice Tacita Dean combines a variety of media such as film, photography, drawing, graphics, and collage. At first sight this approach would seem to have little in common with the sculptural works of Barbara Hepworth. However, already in the 1980s Tacita Dean’s art studies in Falmouth, Cornwall brought her into contact with Hepworth and other artists from the St Ives School. Aside from their shared interest in Cornwall’s landscape and its diversity of shapes, another thing both artists have in common is the importance they attach to the properties of their chosen material in the work process.


With the work Significant Form Tacita Dean deepens her engagement with Hepworth’s artistic legacy in a work conceived for The Hepworth Wakefield. The expansive installation consists of one hundred and thirty motifs from Dean’s collection of postcards, which she amassed over many decades from flea markets. The artist has re-photographed select themes and printed them in various scales and on different types of paper to produce a wall installation. The latter features a wide variety of themes that are, however, similar in their lines and the relationships between the shapes in them and in some cases refer explicitly to one another. The installation includes objects and formations that either originate in nature or were made by hand. Many themes exhibit biomorphic, rounded or semicircular rock formations as well as hills, caves or stalactites. Also on display are Stone Age objects such as megaliths, dolmen or untreated blocks of stone erected singly or positioned in groups. Fountains of water from wells, the belly of a man, a dove, historical portraits and small surreal objects complete the visual compendium. 


Inspired by Hepworth’s formal language, Tacita Dean selected objects that take up Hepworth’s imagery while simultaneously expanding it by citing forms and figures from both the natural and the civilized world. Hepworth’s minimalist-abstract works encounter a wealth of images that is immediately perceived as a visual sampling and whose individual themes depict the potential for sculptural forms. Tacita Dean’s collection of pictures opens up an associative space for possible relationships of form. She creates a coherent whole in the multi-layered constellations from various contexts. And although the thematic space does not convey a linear narration, what does emerge is a visual and abstract-lyrical storyboard of sorts, by means of which viewers can find their way to an individual formal narrative and recognize direct references to Hepworth’s themes. 


Against the foil of Barbara Hepworth’s art this collection of images, which is only seemingly heterogeneous, appears harmonious for all its documentary character. The difference between three-dimensional sculptures and two-dimensional images here not only does not seem to be a contradiction but is also an effective extension of Hepworth’s canon. From childhood Hepworth saw flat forms and contours as three-dimensional structures. The general formal-artistic principles she developed are based on her concept of landscape, which was strongly informed by her youth in Yorkshire and her later adopted home of Cornwall: the standing single form representing the human being in the landscape, two figures for the relationships of living beings to one another and the closed oval or shape interrupted by an opening; These form the basic or primal themes within her work.¹ Hepworth’s sources of inspiration include natural and also cultural-prehistoric monuments such as Chûn Quoit or Mên-an-Tol that shape Cornwall’s landscape. Not only is the inspiration the artist drew from the landscape evident in her sculptural works, Hepworth also captured them in images. In addition to books in which she documented her sculptural works, she photographed the landscape and its natural formations.² 


Bearing this in mind, Tacita Dean’s work can be described as a visual resonance chamber for Hepworth’s artistic world of forms. The title of the work Significant Form establishes a link to the chapter by the same name in the book “Art” (1914) by art critic Clive Bell.³  Bell defined several criteria for his theory that an object must possess in order to be perceived as a significant form. Above all, it is the combination of lines, colors and shapes with each other and their relation to one another. According to Bell the emotions that are evoked determine whether something can be considered a work of art.⁴ 


One thing that particularly emerges in Barbara Hepworth’s work is her acute awareness for the inherent properties of the materials she used. She and her contemporaries coined the term “truth to materials” to express this notion, namely that a sculptural form is determined by the character of the materials used.⁵ Hepworth considered their physical characteristics so as to derive shapes for her works rather than simply forming them: “Each material demands a particular treatment and there are an infinite number of subjects in life each to be re-created in a particular material.”⁶ 


Similarly, Tacita Dean’s works are also concerned with the material aspects of her work medium. Taking a picture, developing and editing it are time-consuming processes for her, during which by necessity the quality of the materials is altered and condensed. For Dean analog photography is not only a medium but also simultaneously the material and content of her work. Unlike digital video, in analog photography material and light come together. Dean is convinced that film material has a certain sensuality and she believes in its possibilities and its history: “There is this unquantifiable thing called depth in a photochemical picture that you don’t have on a digital one. And that’s because it’s layer upon layer of chemicals, layer upon layer of emulsions, and you get this deep, deep richness.”⁷ In her equally conceptional and contemplative analysis the artist demonstrates what constitutes the sensuality and presence of pictures in relation to the materials used – a quality that is in danger of disappearing in the age of digital reproduction. 


Without any further elaboration Tacita Dean’s diverse constellations of images invite us to develop personal associations. Viewers discover individual meanings in the forms that appear familiar to them and link them to the world of themes found in abstract sculpture. Significant Form is a piece of visual poetry that honors Barbara Hepworth’s artistic practice. 

“You can’t make a sculpture, in my opinion, without involving your body. You move and you feel and you breathe and you touch.”¹ 


Electric kettles bubble, water drips slowly down the sides of a large, clear block of ice into a rectangular glass box. The room is dark, a bright cone of light focuses on the block of ice on which Nezaket Ekici stands. She’s wearing an apron and arm warmers sewn from bright yellow cleaning clothes. In her five-hour Pars pro toto performance (2019), she pours hot water over the ice block, works on it with an iron, with her entire body, the warmth of her hands and her face. She takes the meltwater out of the basin beneath, heats it, and starts pouring it over the ice block again. The constant drips erode the ice and over time the geometrical block gives way to several ephemeral ice sculptures molded both by her hand and by chance. They become ever more fragile, eventually break, until the very last bits melt away under the attentive eye of the artist. 


The performance’s title references the Latin expression pars pro toto which indicates that a part can represent the whole. The ice’s gradual melting can be read as a pointer to the transience of life or the passage of time. It equally refers to overarching global processes, such as anthropogenic climate change. The performance highlights the impacts of global warming and the related threats to the Earth – in a powerful audience experience that encourages thought on the issue. Ekici wants in this way to strengthen an awareness of environmental issues and sensitize people to global interrelationships.
 
Ekici has been working artistically with her body for almost 20 years now. She relies on practices such as repetition and acoustic amplification in order to create impressive scenes. Having trained as a sculptor, she resolved early on for the fleeting genre of performance. Her pieces are often defined by great physical effort and as a result develop (in her video recordings, too) a strong presence and urgency. In the recording of the Pars pro toto performance, we can see how exhausting the challenging physical labor with the melting and ephemeral material of ice is. 


Her physical inputs are similarly intensive for the Cohesion Patterns, a series of video performances that Ekici commenced in 2020. In the Lehmbruck Museum she is performing the series live for the first time, subtitling the piece Pierced Form as a direct allusion to Barbara Hepworth, her shapes and above all her artistic practice of Piercing. Using a 50-centimeter-long steel nail waying several kilos, Ekici pierces perforated shapes prefabricated from wood and painted white. In the process she repeatedly pulls a 200-meter-long rope through the openings in the organic, abstract forms. As a result of her immense physical exertion the shapes gradually disappear beneath an ever-denser weave of rope. 


In her artistic practice, Ekici often draws inspiration from role models in art history. In works such as Nobles Opak (since 2004), a multi-day dance performance, she explores art celebrities such as Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. By contrast, Blind (since 2007) draws on a theme from a painting by Surrealist Max Ernst entitled Saint Cecilia (Invisible Piano). Ekici puts herself in the position of the saint’s martyrdom by entering a kind of sarcophagus made of plaster that leaves only her arms free and the openings in which are her only source of air. In her hands she holds a hammer and chisel in order to liberate herself from her prison.² 


Ekici herself views her Cohesion Patterns_Pierced Form performance as an homage to the artist Barbara Hepworth and in the piece also addresses overarching topics such as social gender roles, expectations, and conventions. While she is busy piercing the perforated organic shapes with her needle and thread and thus exercises a traditionally female role, Ekici wears a festive dress and so superficially reinforces the expectations made of her gender. However, the sheer effort of the physical work swiftly shows how absurd such an assumption is. Ekici directs our attention to the prejudices and gender-related cliches which confronted Hepworth in her lifetime, and which persist in the minds of many even today. 

Laurenz Theinert is a media artist. With his roots in photography, he concerns himself with the aesthetic potential of abstraction in the electronic and virtual media, viewing these as the medium of information while liberating them of almost all representative functions. Theinert’s pieces do not depict a reality but create such anew from the properties and structures of the medium itself. His radical reduction of visual information shifts the focus of attention to the mechanisms of perception.


“Concrete Photography”, and Theinert classifies his work as coming under that label,¹ takes as its subject matter photography itself, light and the apparatus that directs, refracts, projects it and lends it material form. In the digital age, this includes electronic image processing, which expands the creative scope. The untrammeled and playful use of contrasts and colors, geometric forms and graphic structures determines the visual dimensions that he explores in his artistic oeuvre. 


Laurenz Theinert’s world of abstract images is not, however, bound to the surface, rather it extends into the third dimension with installations and environments. Light as such becomes the material and the tool, the creative medium that lays an additional perceptual level like a second skin over the environment and develops a life of its own. The projection gives rise to ephemeral color/light spaces that completely “dematerialize” the artwork. Alongside museums and galleries, as a light artist Theinert also works with projections in urban settings and on buildings in the public realm. Lines and surfaces start to move, oscillate, flicker, pulsate, emerge only to disappear again. The dynamic drawings in light culminate in a dance of independent colors and shapes. The 360°-panorama projection gives rise to immersive virtual spaces that interweave with the surfaces of the real surroundings, cover them and permeate them. 


Since 2008, Theinert has also opted for live performances using a visual piano that he designed together with software developers Roland Blach and Philipp Rahlenbeck.² Unlike conventional projection techniques, a keyboard with a Musical-Instrument-Digital-Interface (MIDI) enables not only pre-programmed clips and patterns to be played, as shapes of light can be generated and modulated in real time at the keyboard and pedals. In this way, direct interaction with the musicians and/or dancers becomes possible, and what is heard can be lent spontaneous interpretation as visual patterns. 


Light images and tonal colors, frequencies of light and sound combine when experienced live to form a synesthetic gesamtkunstwerk that unfolds in time, goes beyond the process of hearing and listening, and restructures them. As with his installations and art on buildings, in his light concerts Laurenz Theinert often opts for a site- and context-specific approach. On the occasion of the exhibition The Liberation of Form. Barbara Hepworth – A Master of Abstraction in the Mirror of Modernism Lehmbruck Museum becomes the surface onto which a phantasmagoria of liberated structures, colors, and shapes is projected. Here, artistic abstraction, liberation from the object, transgression and dematerialization seem to be perfected and to have arrived at their temporary final destination.