Big names unveiled for 100-day summer festival for Leeds and Wakefield

An artist who last Easter unveiled two monumental figures on the roof of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is revealed today as one of the sculptors whose work will decorate Leeds and Wakefield next year.
SCULPTURE: Ayse Erkman's Glass Works 2015.SCULPTURE: Ayse Erkman's Glass Works 2015.
SCULPTURE: Ayse Erkman's Glass Works 2015.

Huma Bhabha, whose 12ft grotesque, titled We Come in Peace, still stands against the Manhattan skyline, will produce her next work in Wakefield city centre as part of the first Yorkshire Sculpture International, a £1.4m event aimed at placing the former home of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth at the centre of today’s sculpture community.

Ms Bhabha will spend time in Yorkshire creating a large-scale work that will go on show in a public location. The Turkish artist Ayşe Erkmen will produce a second work, to be exhibited in the centre of Leeds.

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The triennial festival, which brings together the Henry Moore Institute, the Hepworth Wakefield, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Leeds Art Gallery, will announce today that its line-up also includes the international sculptors Wolfgang Laib, Rashid Johnson, Tau Lewis and Nobuko Tsuchiya.

Jane Bhoyroo, the event’s producer, said the pulling power of the four institutions had been instrumental in attracting some of the world’s biggest names.

“We are known as the home of sculpture but through this project we really want to become known internationally, and we also want local people to become more aware of the institutions,” she said.

The festival will run over 100 days from June 22 to September 29 next year, with free entry.