Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

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Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (b. 1912 St Andrews, UK - d. 2004 St Andrews, UK) was a pioneer of British abstraction and a prominent member of the St Ives group. She was elected honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1999 and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2001. Recently Barns-Graham was the subject of Mark Cousins' award-winning documentary, A Sudden Glimpse of Deeper Things (2024). A major retrospective of her work is due to open at Tate St Ives in October 2026.

 

Barns-Graham graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1937, and in 1940 moved to St Ives, Cornwall where she developed close relationships within a milieu of artists-Ben Nicholson and Bernard Leach became her close friends. From 1960 onwards she split her time between St Ives, Cornwall and St Andrews, Fife, often referring to the 'close affinity between the two Celtic atmospheres' of her two spiritual homes.[1] Her practice was deeply impacted by place and in an oeuvre spanning seven decades, her works were consistently rooted in an exploration of nature, particularly its hidden structures and elemental forces. Barns-Graham's stimulus for making often came from the landscapes she explored, travelling frequently - including to volcanic areas of Lanzarote, clay formations of Tuscany, and the beaches of Orkney.  

 

Primarily a painter, Barns-Graham developed her own abstract vocabulary of distinctive line, form and colour through a physical and conceptual engagement with nature. Her earlier representational work became distilled abstract forms, through direct observational drawings and watercolour. She increasingly drew on feeling, memory, sensation and the emotional properties of colour through continuous experimentation, with motifs in her visual language developing from the structures and tensions in geomorphological aspects of landscape.  

 

In 1949, Barns-Graham visited the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland, which would prove to be a pivotal moment in her career, embarking on a series of paintings which she would thematically return to in later years to come. The Glaciers paintings transformed her understanding of nature, absorbing theories of natural geometries and realising a constant state of flux of the natural world. In her work, elements of the landscape became increasingly abstracted, looking to the constructivist principles of Naum Gabo in his exploration of an exterior and interior space.  

 

Continuing to explore elemental changes and nature in motion, from the mid- 1970s onwards she made numerous iconic line drawings describing sea and wind moving across the sand. Pulsating lines echo the sound of crashing water meeting the shore. This vitality and reverie of visual movement is reflected in a significant body of paintings known as Things of Kind: Order and Disorder (1963-1973), comprising geometric squares and circles in playful compositions. The series, Expanding Forms (1979-1983) continued this dynamic expression leading to her final decade defined by the Scorpio Series, where the dynamics of colour, form and movement underpin her thinking.  

 

Barns-Graham is represented in many collections, including Tate, UK; The British Museum, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Arts Council Collection, London, UK; Government Art Collection, UK; Hepworth Museum, Wakefield; the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Scottish Arts Council Collection, Edinburgh, UK; and the New South Wales Art Gallery, Australia; National Gallery of New Zealand, Wellington; and many others. 

 

Recent exhibitions include a solo display of drawings at the British Museum (2024), a large-scale solo exhibition at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne (2023) and a duo show at Tate St Ives (2022). Barns-Graham's first retrospective was at Edinburgh's City Art Centre in 1989 which toured to Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance, UK; Perth Museum and Art Gallery, UK; Crawford Arts Centre, St Andrews, UK; and Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr, UK. She has been included in group shows including Living the Landscape, Museum Belvédère, Heerenveen, Netherlands (2022); St Ives: Connecting Circles, Pallant House (2021); St Ives: Movements in Art and Life, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, UK(2020); Forty Years of Modern Art 1945-1985 at Tate in 1986; Contemporary Scottish Paintings, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, UK (1970); Aspects of Contemporary Scottish Painting, South London Art Gallery, UK (1955); British Painting and Sculpture 1954, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (1954) and the inaugural exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK in 1950, Aspects of British Art, among others.