This Living Hand: Edmund de Waal presents Henry Moore

Explore the role of touch in Henry Moore’s sculpture in This Living Hand, a new exhibition curated by acclaimed artist and author, Edmund de Waal.

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 Auguste Rodin and Michelangelo, two of his favourite artists, had done before him.

In this innovative exhibition, you are invited to touch a collection of Moore’s work in bronze and stone, plus a series of original carved benches created by the curator from Hornton stone – one of Henry Moore’s favourite materials.

In addition, Edmund de Waal has curated a selection of artworks which express Moore’s fascination with the expressive power and symbolism of the hand: from Reclining Figure: Hand 1979 to the numerous two and three-dimensional studies of his own and other subjects’ hands – including the drawings and lithographs he made in 1978 of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Dorothy Hodgkin, who wanted her hands to be used as her portrait.

“To be able to touch Moore’s sculpture is a unique experience. It brings our haptic knowledge into connection with the hands of his King and Queen (1952-53), the patinated surface of Reclining Figure: Hand (1979). We see a Wunderkammer of objects that Moore kept close by him at home, objects of haptic sustenance and renewal. We see a life of reflection on how hands become sculpture. We are returned to what knowledge our own hands hold.”

Edmund de Waal, curator of the exhibition