Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: A Scottish Artist in St Ives

With work from every period of her varied career, this exhibition casts a light on the influence of her Scottish background, while exploring her training at Edinburgh College of Art and her continuing links to Scotland following her move to St Ives.

Originally from St Andrews, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912 – 2004) established an international reputation as a leading British modernist in St Ives, where she lived throughout her life. In 1951, she won the Painting Prize in the Penwith Society of Arts in Cornwall Festival of Britain Exhibition and went on to have her first London solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in 1952. She was included in many of the important exhibitions on pioneering British abstract art that took place in the 1950s. Though not short of exposure throughout the 1960s and 70s, her next greatest successes came in the last decade of her life. Download the exhibition handlist here

Organised in association with The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust and curated by Lynne Green. To watch a short film about Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, ‘Looking in Looking out’ by Tim Fitzpatrick, 2012 for the Barns-Graham Trust, click on this link: Barns-Graham film
Ground floor galleries: a selection of Newlyn School and Lamorna Group paintings on view upstairs in Gallery 5