Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: Mirage

Hales is delighted to announce Mirage, a solo exhibition of works by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (b. 1912 St Andrews, UK - d. 2004 St Andrews, UK) - a pioneer of British abstraction and a prominent member of the St Ives group. Barns-Graham's first solo show with the gallery pinpoints key recurring themes throughout her seven-decade oeuvre, reflecting her deep engagement with nature. Recently Barns-Graham was the subject of Mark Cousins' award-winning documentary, A Sudden Glimpse of Deeper Things (2024). A career-wide survey at Museum Belvedere, Netherlands will open June 2026, followed by a major retrospective at Tate St Ives, opening October 2026.

 

The exhibition, Mirage, takes its title from a 1970s series which explores ethereal and atmospheric plays of light on the earth's surface. Barns-Graham's stimulus often came from the landscapes she explored, Cornish seascapes from living in St Ives to travelling frequently - including to the volcanic areas of Lanzarote and the beaches of Orkney. Drawn to rugged rock formations, her work demonstrates a fascination with stratification and the shifting rhythms of the natural world. Returning to her experience of place throughout her career, the works show Barns-Graham's evolving strategies and complexities of composition within her practice.

 

Barns-Graham developed her own abstract vocabulary of distinctive line, form and colour through a physical and conceptual engagement with nature. 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 found in landscape.  Barns-Graham was in search of the essence of place, Mel Gooding stated that she 'proved herself a draughtsman of genius, capable of tracing in precisely simple or complex linearity the elemental energies and structures of the natural world.' (2007)

 

Barns-Graham intensely observed natural formations and the powerful effects of the elements, from the sea, wind movements, clouds in the sky, aiming to 'give a sense of constant change + renewal - [of] impermanence.'[1] This study of the effects of weather in relation to ecological change and the impermanence of the earth's surface feels even more significant today.

 

Barns-Graham 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.

 

Barns-Graham is represented in many collections, including Tate, UK; The British Museum, London, UK; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Arts Council Collection, London, UK; Government Art Collection, UK; The Hepworth Wakefield, UK; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK; and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; Museum of New Zealand - Te Papa Tongarewa; 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. 

 

Today, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's legacy is furthered by the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust, established by the artist during her lifetime.