Barbara Hepworth’s Greek Journey Comes Into View in New Exhibition

CHICHESTER, United Kingdom — A forthcoming exhibition at Pallant House Gallery will examine how Barbara Hepworth’s 1954 journey through Greece shaped her sculpture, paintings and drawings for years afterward.

Barbara Hepworth and Greece opens on 21 November 2026 and runs until 2 May 2027. The gallery describes it as the first exhibition dedicated specifically to Hepworth’s relationship with Greece.

The British sculptor travelled through Venice and the Greek islands following the death of her eldest son, Paul, in a plane crash. It was her only visit to Greece, but her diary, sketches and later works show that the journey became a continuing artistic reference.

The exhibition will place extracts from that diary alongside sculptures, paintings, drawings and prints. Works include Curved Form (Delphi) from 1955 and Pierced Form (Santorin) from 1963, which the gallery says will be publicly exhibited for the first time.

A feature published by the Financial Times on 27 August traces Hepworth’s experience of places including Kos, Rhodes and Patmos. The Greek islands’ light, architecture, landscape and archaeological sites entered her artistic language without producing literal travel illustration.

That distinction matters. Women artists’ travels are sometimes narrated primarily through biography, grief or relationships, while men’s journeys are treated as intellectual and formal development. Hepworth’s loss is essential context, but the exhibition’s deeper contribution should be to show how observation became artistic method.

Her diaries are also more than emotional documents. They can help establish chronology, identify visual sources and reveal how an artist tested language before resolving ideas through material and form.

Curators must still avoid presenting Greece simply as an inspirational backdrop available to a visiting British modernist. The exhibition can acknowledge the history, religious meaning and local interpretation of the places and objects Hepworth encountered.

The show arrives at a moment when museums are reassessing how women’s modernism has been collected and explained. Hepworth is already internationally recognised, but specific influences within her work can remain underexamined even for a famous artist.

By reconstructing one journey in depth, the exhibition offers a more precise account of creative renewal—one in which grief, landscape, research and formal experimentation coexist without reducing the artist to any single part of her life.