This Living Hand: Edmund de Waal presents Henry Moore
3 April – 25 October 2020
Release date: Friday, 27 September 2019
The 2020 exhibition at Henry Moore Studios & Gardens will be curated by acclaimed artist and author, Edmund de Waal. Entitled This Living Hand, the exhibition will explore the role of touch and the iconography of the hand in Henry Moore’s art.
Moore believed that ‘tactile experience is very important as an aesthetic dimension in sculpture’. Throughout his career he repeatedly emphasised the importance of experiencing sculpture haptically, and often returned to the hand as a subject in his sculpture and drawings, studying its expressive power and symbolic values as Auguste Rodin and Michelangelo, two of his favourite artists, had done before him.
The exhibition will present a selection of original sculptures and other objects which visitors will be invited to touch, as well as a group of drawings and sculptural works charting Moore’s interest in the hand as a subject, from Reclining Figure: Hand 1979 to the numerous two and three-dimensional studies of his own and other subjects’ hands – including the drawings and lithographs he made in 1978 of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Dorothy Hodgkin, who wanted her hands to be used as her portrait.
Venue details
Venue address
Henry Moore Studios & Gardens
Dane Tree House
Perry Green
Hertfordshire
SG10 6EE
United Kingdom
T: +44 (0)1279 843 333
Opening times
Opening times 2022:
1 April to 30 October 2022
Wednesdays to Sundays and Bank Holidays, 11am-5pm
Henry Moore Archive:
Open by appointment. Monday to Friday, 10am-4.30pm