No. 372B 1981

ROBERT KLIPPEL (1920-2001)

No. 372B 1981

bronze
252.0 x 56.0 x 47.0 cm
signed with initials, dated, inscribed and numbered to base: RK 372 '81 4/6
edition: 4/6

Provenance:
Private collection, Melbourne
Menzies, Sydney, 23 September 2014, lot 35
Company collection, Melbourne
Menzies, Melbourne, 10 August 2017, lot 36
Private collection of Mr Rodney Menzies
Estate of the above

Exhibited:
Robert Klippel, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 12 June - 29 August 1993 (another example)
Robert Klippel 23 Bronze Sculptures, Australian Art Resources, Melbourne, 16 August - 29 September 2001, cat.20 (illus. exhibition catalogue, p.28, another example)

Reference:
Gleeson, J., Robert Klippel, Bay Books, Sydney, 1983, p.478 (illus. p.414, pl.379, another example)
Edwards, D., Robert Klippel, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002, pp.141, 250 (illus. p.192, another example)
Edwards, D., Robert Klippel: Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture [CD-ROM], Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002, cat.372b (illus.)

Estimate: $40000 - 60000

Result Hammer: $40000

Robert Klippel’s much-quoted mantra ‘make it new’ encapsulates his life-long view that Modern Art had to create rather than re-create. For him, true creativity meant going beyond Nature. For Klippel, this was the crux of Modernism - the creation of new man-made additions to Nature.

Perhaps nowhere is the success of such an appositional tussle more aesthetically evident than in his Federal Government funded public sculpture commission for the opening of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II formally inaugurated the gallery on 12 October 1982. Klippel’s sculpture commission led to the creation of a group of eight bronze cast works that stand in a garden pond within the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. The present bronze sculpture, Klippel’s No. 372B, is one in a very limited edition of these.

Klippel was commissioned by James Mollison, the far-sighted founding Director of the National Gallery of Australia, and in 1981 the Group of Eight, as the cast bronze artworks came to be called, was initially constructed from sections of prefabricated wooden pattern parts that the artist had found in 1964 and stored away for the next seventeen years.

Klippel’s development from wood assemblage to bronze cast sculpture during the early to late eighties extended the parameters of reuse and recycling to an artistic form of upcycling – where found and prefabricated objects are technically remade and materially transmuted. Bronze casting allowed Klippel to push assemblage toward a new architectonic unity. Klippel’s Group of Eight modified assemblage sculptures were cast in bronze by Peter Morley at his Meridian Foundry in Melbourne and installed as artist’s proofs, from a proposed edition of six, in the garden pond of the NGA Sculpture Park between July and October 1982 (Nos: 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371 and 372 – the present work). These were Klippel’s first major bronze cast sculptures.

Klippel’s Group of Eight sculptures of 1982 possess both assured ‘objecthood’ and affirmed autonomy. These two rare and almost totemic attributes give them their reinforcing spatial presence and stately dignity. Klippel’s No. 372B possesses a towering sentinel-like structure that employs verticality as an artistic format. It rises from a horizontal plane and emphasizes compositional cohesion by emphasizing the vertical visual progression of various cross sectioned parts of mechanical components. The sculpture’s industrial elements and mechanical components, loosed from their once functional purposes, are reconfigured purely through the artist’s recognition and physical manipulation of their interrelated visual properties. Their vertically arranged restructured surfaces, shapes and shadows build up coherent visual progressions of abstract forms that compose aesthetically viable sculptural entities. The sculpture’s visual and material unity conveys a sense of sculptural ‘objecthood’. What the viewer sees is a conversation of sculptural forms. In this formal compositional sense, the present sculpture is very closely related to similar large sentinel-form bronze works in the Lowenstein Collection and the LaTrobe University Collection in Melbourne.

Klippel’s bronze No. 372B of 1981 has something of the solemnity of primitive carved burial posts, the stasis and visual weight of totems and, overall, the demeanour of an almost pharaonic regality. The artist and writer James Gleeson, Klippel’s close life-long friend, shared the spirit of these observations when he described the Group of Eight series of sculptures, to which the present sculpture belongs, as having an ‘archaic gravity’- the series is unique in his fifty-five-year artistic output.

Klippel’s upcycled bronze sculptures of 1981-1982 are an aesthetic culmination of three years of experimentation with the sculptural potential of columnar structures. He had refined the compositions of his bronze cast assemblage sculptures to emphasize a central sense of solemn almost meditative composure; that is, the type of composure that suggests the ability of any one of them to stand in an easy relationship with its environment - in fact, with almost any environment.

Associate Professor Ken Wach
Associate Professor Ken Wach is the former Principal Research Fellow and Head of the School of Creative Arts at The University of Melbourne.

• 

  Cameron Menzies, Chairman & Head of Private Sales

  cmenzies@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 466 636 142 

• 

  Asta Cameron, Art Specialist

  acameron@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 400 914 088

• 
  
  Clementine Retallack, Front of House Manager & Associate Art Specialist
  
  cretallack@menziesartbrands.com
  +61 (0) 478 493 026