The spare, graceful, revelatory sculptures of Kim Lim

In 1989, the sculptor Lorna Green circulated a questionnaire among 320 of her female peers about their experiences as women in a male-dominated field; three years ago she sent a follow-up survey. The work of 29 respondents to both is currently on show in an instructive exhibition, If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain 1960-2023 at the Saatchi Gallery (until 22 January). They include Kim Lim (1936-97), who is the subject of an overdue retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield. 

Lim’s stone carvings were a revelation to me when I first saw them at Camden Arts Centre in 1999, but it’s only now, with this first full career retrospective, that audiences have the chance to follow her development from the found wood and painted steel forms of the 1960s through to the carvings in marble, Portland stone and granite on which she focused from the late 1970s. In whatever medium – including prints and paper cuts – her art was always spare and graceful. It was important to her ‘to make a clear, unfussy statement of form’.

Born in Singapore to a Malaysian-Chinese family, Lim came to London aged 18 in 1954 to study sculpture at Central St Martin’s under Anthony Caro and Elisabeth Frink. When Caro, still in his figurative phase, belittled her first forays into abstraction, Frink advised her to move to the Slade. But it was her extensive travels, first alone and then with her husband, the sculptor William Turnbull, that constituted her ‘main art education’. In Greece, Italy, Egypt, Cambodia, Japan and China, the architecture impressed her as much as the art: ‘I found that I always responded to things that were done in earlier civilisations that seemed to have less elaboration and more strength.’

Her stone carvings close the gap between ancient and modern, the grooves in ‘Windstone’ (1989) recalling the fluting of ancient Greek columns and the slashes in ‘Column P’ (1984) the sliced canvases of Lucio Fontana.