Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

The exhibition presents approximately seventy works from different periods of the career of the Scottish modernist painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004). Barns-Graham settled in 1940 in the artists’ village of St Ives in Cornwall, which, during the 1950s and 1960s and under the influence of artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, developed into a center of modernist art. From the 1960s onwards, she divided her time between Cornwall and Scotland.

Initially starting as a landscape painter in a naïve style, she gradually developed into an artist who explored the underlying structures of the landscape. She did not aim to depict the landscape as a visual fact, but rather to represent nature as a formative force. In her later work, the colours of the landscape take an increasingly central role, resulting in expressive, rhythmic compositions full of light and movement.

Cover image: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Two Island Series (Orkney), 1987, oil and pencil on hardboard, 29.8 x 60.8 cm