Our 2021 exhibition at Henry Moore Studios & Gardens has been curated by acclaimed artist and author, Edmund de Waal. The exhibition explores the role of touch and the hand in Henry Moore’s art and visitors will be encouraged to touch the sculptures on display.

Moore believed that ‘tactile experience is very important as an aesthetic dimension in sculpture’. Throughout his career he repeatedly emphasised the importance of experiencing sculpture haptically, and often returned to the hand as a subject in his sculpture and drawings, studying its expressive power and symbolic values as Rodin and Michelangelo, two of his favourite artists, had done before him.

This Living Hand focuses on Moore’s interest in the hand as a subject, from the monumental bronze Reclining Figure: Hand 1979 to the numerous two dimensional studies he made of his own and other subjects’ hands – including the drawings and lithographs made in 1978 of the Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Dorothy Hodgkin, who asked Moore to use her hands as her portrait.