During the early 2010s we often headed up to Wakefield in Yorkshire so that we could catch a game of Rugby League from the team we’d decided to support and to explore the local area since we’d made the effort to travel that far. It wasn’t until our 2014 visit, though, that we decided that we should take a look at the Hepworth Wakefield, a contemporary art gallery and museum named for the sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth who is arguably the city’s most famous child. After Jane McDonald.
The gallery opened in 2011 and its modernist, brutalist form of trapezoidal blocks faced with concrete was instantly appealing to us when we first saw the building a few years earlier, especially with the reflections in the River Calder. If you’re going to showcase contemporary art then you need a contemporary building.
It was impossible not to be mildly stunned by the grinning clown sculpture constructed from scrap metal and trash that was suspended by the boat yard just at the entrance to the museum. It’s the sort of thing that could appear as an enemy in Doctor Who.
As for the major artworks on show outside and inside the Hepworth Wakefield I’m not going to attempt to identify what they are especially as a decade has passed since our visit, but the pieces on display at the time included some by Dame Barbara, of course, as well as Henry Moore and other modern artists. Some people don’t like modern art in general, some people love it, but we’re firmly of the opinion that each piece needs to be taken on its own merit. There were some elements we didn’t care for, and others we enjoyed either for the workmanship or interpretation of what we could see. Sometimes you just like something without even knowing why and you don’t always have to question that.
We didn’t spend a long time at the Hepworth Wakefield because we were on a schedule to get to the rugby ground for the last game of the season but it was a pleasant side-trip and for us worth the time spent there.