Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Glacier Crystal, Grindelwald, 1950 © Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust
Hales is delighted to announce a major retrospective of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s work, opening at Tate St Ives in the autumn (24 October 2026 – 11 April 2027). This landmark exhibition will be the first to chart the full span of Barns-Graham’s extraordinary eight-decade career.
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.
Bringing together more than 170 paintings, drawings, prints, and archival materials, the exhibition will trace Barns-Graham’s journey from her formative years at Edinburgh College of Art and her early experiences within the vibrant St Ives artistic community, through to her later work created between Cornwall and Scotland. The exhibition concludes with works from her celebrated Scorpio series, made during the final two decades of her life.
Bringing together more than 170 paintings, drawings, prints, and archival materials, the exhibition will trace Barns-Graham’s journey from her formative years at Edinburgh College of Art and her early experiences within the vibrant St Ives artistic community, through to her later work created between Cornwall and Scotland. The exhibition concludes with works from her celebrated Scorpio series, made during the final two decades of her life.
May 6, 2025
