Hepworth Wakefield Awarded Curatorial Research Grant for Surrealist Art

In 2021 the Hepworth Wakefield were awarded a Curatorial Research Grant by the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) to support work on two recent bequests to their collection.

One of the two bequests was The Jeffrey Sherwin & Family Collection of British Surrealism and the associated archive, which has greatly enhanced the Hepworth Wakefield’s collection of Surrealist art.

Dr Jeffrey Sherwin (1936–2018) championed visual arts in the north of England throughout his life, starting out as a collector whilst a junior doctor. As a Leeds city councillor, Sherwin was instrumental in developing the Henry Moore Institute of which Moore himself laid the foundation stone in April 1980. Sherwin was a much-loved general practitioner in Leeds for forty years and contributed significantly to the civic and cultural life of the city.

In 1986, an exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery was Jeffrey Sherwin’s first encounter with British Surrealism which, in his own words, “made me return and look again and again”. For Jeffrey and his wife Ruth, it inspired a lifetime of collecting Surrealist works of art and related archive material. In 2014 Sherwin wrote British Surrealism Opened Up, in the words of the author, an “everyman guide” to British Surrealism.

The Curatorial Research Grant, awarded by the PMC, supported the Hepworth Wakefield in helping alleviate the costs of employing a research curator to work on researching this collection. As a result of this work, a new exhibition, Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscape, will be opening at the Hepworth Wakefield from 23 November 2024 to 21 April 2025. This exhibition features works directly from the Jeffrey Sherwin & Family Collection as well as disseminating research from the wider research project.

More information about the exhibition can be found here.