S otheby’s is pleased to present Intimate Form: A Collection of Small-Scale Sculpture by Henry Moore. Maquettes were small models Moore created as studies for a larger sculpture. This exhibition displays for the first time in Hong Kong, forty miniature works, most of which can fit in the hand.
Henry Moore stands as one of the most transformative figures in 20th-century sculpture, a visionary whose work redefined the parameters of modern art. His signature semi-abstract forms, often rendered in bronze and stone, are celebrated for their organic fluidity and profound engagement with the human figure.
Born in Yorkshire, he studied at the Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art before becoming one of Europe's leading avant-garde sculptors in the 1930s. His career spanned sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and textile design, achieving global recognition in his lifetime and shaping a British sculptural renaissance.
Moore’s works can be found in the collections of globally renowned institutions such as the Henry Moore Foundation in Leeds, Tate Britain in London, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Samsung Collection in Korea, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among many other. In Hong Kong, Moore held several solo exhibitions at the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 1965 and 1970, with permanent pieces in Exchange Square and Jardine House.
15 January - 2 February 2026
Monday–Saturday | 11:00AM–7:00PM
Sunday & Public Holiday | 11:00AM–6:00PM
Sotheby's Maison, Hong Kong
G/F, Landmark Chater, 8 Connaught Road Central, Central
Enquiries:
Fusako Oshima | Fusako.Oshima@sothebys.com
Specialist, Private Sales, Asia
T he theme of mother and child was one Moore returned to throughout his career — a central and enduring subject. His early masterful treatment of this motif earned him his first major public commission in 1943, for the Madonna and Child at St. Matthew’s Church in Northampton. His experiences of the war, as well as the death of his mother and the birth of his daughter, encouraged and inspired him to enshrine this motif in particular. He wrote:
“…the subject itself is eternal and unending, with so many sculptural possibilities in it – a small form in relation to a big form, the big form protecting the small one, and so on. It is such a rich subject, both humanly and compositionally, that I will always go on using it.”
The present work is a tender and playful representation of this subject. The child stands balanced on their mother’s knees. While connected there is also a degree of independence, with the child standing for the first time perhaps, or perhaps fall into the mother’s arms.
“There are three fundamental poses of the human figure. One is standing. The other is seated, and the third is lying down [...]. Of the three poses, the reclining figure gives the most freedom, compositionally and spatially.”
Among Moore’s most enduring motifs is the reclining female figure, a subject that captivated the artist throughout his career. From the 1920s until his final years, he returned to this theme repeatedly, reimagining and refining it through a process of abstraction, division, and reinvention. The result is a body of work that distills the human form to its elemental essence, capturing both its physicality and its poetic resonance.
The present work exemplifies Moore’s mastery of this iconic subject. By this stage in his career, Moore had achieved a remarkable fluency in his practice, a point he himself acknowledged: "there's no need any longer to search for a personal style: I find work comes naturally". This effortless command is evident in the sculpture’s rhythmic undulations, where form and space intertwine with a sense of inevitability. The work synthesizes the formal innovations Moore explored over decades, showcasing his ability to balance abstraction with a deeply humanistic sensibility.
Moore’s fascination with the reclining figure began around 1924, when he carved his first iteration of the subject. Its development was influenced by Moore’s engagement with art history. Yet, for Moore, the reclining figure was more than a historical reference; it was an archetype that offered boundless possibilities for formal experimentation. Freed from the constraints of naturalistic representation, Moore used the motif to explore composition, space, and the interplay of mass and void. As he once remarked, "I want to be quite free of having to find a ‘reason’ for doing the Reclining Figures, and freer still of having to find a ‘meaning’ for them."
Moore began using strings in his artistic practice in 1937. In this series of works he references the influence of fellow sculptors Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth who were both interested in the intersection of solid form and space.
In 1968, Moore describes the origin of his interest in strings:
“Undoubtedly the source of my stringed figures was the Science Museum ... I was fascinated by the mathematical models I saw there, which had been made to illustrate the difference of the form that is half-way between a square and a circle. It wasn’t the scientific study of these models but the ability to look through the strings as with a bird cage and to see one form within another which excited me.”
‘Stringed Figure’ demonstrates the influence of these models in the way the tautness of the wire contrasts with the rounded contours of the polished bronze figure. It encloses and intersects the interior space, still allowing air to travel through the form. Above all, the presence of the strings disrupts the gaze of the viewer, provoking an awareness of the space both within and surrounding the sculpture. The strings also form a tie between the various peaks and troughs of the human-like form, uniting the two concepts into one flowing entity.
H
enry Moore was a major British sculptor whose organically shaped, semiabstract, and often monumental bronze and stone figures made him one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century.
Born into a Yorkshire coal-mining family on July 30, 1898, Moore started training as a schoolteacher, until he was called to serve in World War I and was injured. Thanks to a rehabilitation grant in September 1919, he studied drawing and sculpture at the Leeds School of Art, from which he obtained a scholarship to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London. There, he spent time at the British Museum, discovering the power and beauty of Egyptian, Etruscan, pre-Columbian and African sculpture. Reacting against the European sculptural tradition, Moore moved away from the human figure to experiment with abstract shapes that made use of organic and natural forms – he studied bones, pebbles, and shells to understand what he called “nature’s principles of form and rhythm.”
From his first one-man exhibition and public commission in London in the late 1920s to his 1943 commission of a Madonna and Child for the church of St. Matthew in Northampton to his Reclining Figure, 1956–58, for the UNESCO building in Paris, Moore developed a distinct Modernist sculptural language that earned him international critical acclaim. After establishing the Henry Moore Foundation in 1977 and giving many sculptures from a 1978 exhibition of his work at London’s Serpentine Gallery to the Tate museum. His style, alongside fellow artists Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, would come to define British Modernist art.
Along with museums around the world, Moore’s work is in the collections of England’s Chatsworth House, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Kew Gardens, and Fitzwilliam Museum.
