Leo Webster
Senior Specialist
Lot 46AR
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE RWA(British, 1912-2004)Family Series (Ochre)
21 May 2025, 12:00 BST
EdinburghSold for £7,680 inc. premium
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Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE RWA (British, 1912-2004)
Family Series (Ochre)
signed and dated 'W. Barns Graham 1976' (on the artist's prepared backboard, lower right)
oil on board
30 x 38cm (11 13/16 x 14 15/16in) (including painted backing board).
WBG cat.no.01/760.
signed and dated 'W. Barns Graham 1976' (on the artist's prepared backboard, lower right)
oil on board
30 x 38cm (11 13/16 x 14 15/16in) (including painted backing board).
WBG cat.no.01/760.
Footnotes
Provenance
With Aitken Dott & Son, Edinburgh, August - September 1981.
The Artist.
Private collection, UK (acquired from the above); thence by descent.
Exhibited
Edinburgh, Aitken Dott & Son, Festival Exhibition - W. Barns-Graham, 14 August - 5 September 1981, cat.no.28.
By the mid 1970's Barns-Graham was employing hard-edged geometric and linear forms. Her capacity to make them serve the purpose of expression can be argued as being unique. Never fixed, her forms are always moving across the surface. These remained the basis of her work for the next two decades. Barns-Graham's work of the 1970s is neither St Ives nor Scottish, but looks to a tradition of modernism more disciplined, abstract and formal than either; and she followed the tradition with rigour and resoluteness.