The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture 2018

Established in 2016, The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture highlights the work of artists based in the UK, at any stage in their careers, who have made a significant contribution to the development of contemporary sculpture. This year, Michael Dean, Mona Hatoum, Phillip Lai, Magali Reus and Cerith Wyn Evans have all been shortlisted for the £30,000 biennial award.

Joseph Buckley: Traitor Muscle at Art in General, New York

For his first solo US exhibition, British artist Joseph Buckley has produced an ambitious new body of sculpture that draws on historical and personal memory to negotiate the complexities of black identity.

Polly Apfelbaum: Waiting for the UFOs (a space set between a landscape and a bunch of flowers) at Ikon Gallery

In this major survey of new and recent works, Apfelbaum fills Ikon's galleries with large-scale, colourful installations of textiles, ceramics and drawings, exemplifying her preoccupation with space, obsession and otherness. Here she likens the gallery space to a kind of landscape, populated by both her work - colourful, like flowers - and the visitors moving through it.

Elisabeth Frink: Humans and Other Animals at Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

Positioning Frink as as one of the most important British sculptors of the second half of the twentieth century, Humans and Other Animals offers new perspectives on the themes found in her work. This largest showing of Frink's work in 25 years explores the artist's enduring preoccupation with human and animal forms and the symbiotic relationship between them.

Sarah Lucas: Au Natural at New Museum, New York City and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

The first US retrospective on the work on Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, London, UK), this exhibition of over 170 works made over the course of thirty years highlights Lucas' sculptural provocations that force reconsiderations of the female body's vulnerability alongside notions of power, control, and authority.

Acquisition of John Latham's 'Firenze' (1967) by Leeds Museums and Galleries

This important work by John Latham, one of the founders of British conceptualism, challenges notions of what sculpture can be and poses questions about materiality, found objects, assemblage, destruction and the production of knowledge. 'Firenze' will be displayed at Leeds Art Gallery as part of the forthcoming major exhibition The Sculpture Collections between March and September 2018.

Anthony McCall: Solid Light Works at The Hepworth Wakefield

Solid Light Works is the first major UK exhibition of artist Anthony McCall’s work in over a decade. It explores all facets of his work and includes the UK premieres of three ‘solid light’ installations.

In the Peaceful Dome at Bluecoat

In the Peaceful Dome concludes Bluecoat's 300th anniversary programme and reflects on the role of art and the artist throughout the history of Bluecoat's building. The exhibition brings together historic and contemporary art, new commissions and archival material to set up conversations across time. It traces threads that connect points from Bluecoat's past with the present.

Journeys with 'The Waste Land' at Turner Contemporary

Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ is a major exhibition exploring the relationship between T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem and the visual arts. Presenting over sixty artists, and almost a hundred objects, the exhibition is the culmination of a three year project designed to radically rethink traditional curatorial processes.

Helen Marten: Drunk Brown House at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery

Combining sculpture, text and screen-printed paintings, this exhibition brought together old and new work in an installation conceived specifically for the Serpentine by London-based artist Helen Marten (b. 1985, Macclesfield, UK), who won both the 2016 Turner Prize and the inaugural Hepworth Sculpture Prize.

Martin Puryear at Parasol Unit

Surveying forty years of Puryear’s career, taking in large-scale works in wood and metal to rarely seen prints, Parasol unit reveal his dedication to natural materials and expose his highly personal, curvy formal vocabulary, somewhere between abstraction and figuration.

John Chamberlain: Sculptures at Inverleith House

In 2015 we awarded a grant to Inverleith House, part of the Royal Botanical Garden, Edinburgh, enabling them to stage the first exhibition of John Chamberlain's works in a UK public gallery. The exhibition ran from 25 July to 4 October 2015 with outdoor sculptures on display until 9 December 2015.
The Director and Curator of Inverleith House, Paul Nesbitt, writes about the impact of the exhibition.

Art Sheffield: Zero Hours

In 2013 we awarded a grant of £9,000 to Art Sheffield for their Festival of Contemporary Art. The grant enabled Art Sheffield to agree the loan of 'Wirtschaftswerte' ('Economic Values') by Joseph Beuys from the SMAK collection in Ghent. Art Sheffield took this key historical work as the provocation for the festival theme, Zero Hours.

The Pier Arts Centre - 'Two Forms (Orkney)'

The addition of Barbara Hepworth's 'Two Forms (Orkney)' to the Pier Arts Centre Collection had been a long held aspiration of the Centre. The sculpture was identified as being the most important art work relating directly to the collection that had remained - until now - outside of it.