KLIPPEL, ROBERT (1920-2001)

"Untitled (Quartet)" (c.1950)
mixed media
16.5 x 29cm
unsigned, details on verso
*private collection, Sydney
 
Klippel is widely considered Australia's greatest sculptor. He began a sculpture course at East Sydney Technical College the following year, exploring the figure through life drawing, modeling in clay, and carving in stone and wood. In 1947, Klippel left Australia for London where he studied at the Slade School. At the end of 1948 Klippel and James Gleeson arrived in Paris, the ‘dream city of surrealism’, where they met André Breton and other French surrealists back from New York after the war. Klippel began experimenting with a modified form of surrealist automatism that imbued his abstract geometries with a nervy unpredictability. These ‘anatomies of sculptural energy’ took two forms: abstract expressionist ‘space-frame’ drawings and ‘tension-construction’ sculptures.Returning to Sydney in 1950, Klippel mixed with abstract artists, exhibiting with William Rose, John Olsen, John Passmore and Eric Smith in Direction I in 1956. He acquired new skills through a series of night courses in arc welding, silver soldering and panel beating. Metals allowed Klippel to soar into space in ways that earth-bound wooden structures could not sustain. In 1957, Klippel moved to New York and rented a studio from his friend, the assemblage artist Richard Stankiewicz. Alerted to the accidental but unlimited vocabulary of shapes available in junk metals, he began to create rigorously abstract yet metaphorically ‘alive’ assemblages of spiky and bristling forms from mundane materials such as typewriter parts, sending 19 back to Sydney for an exhibition at the Clune Gallery.The success of the exhibition prompted Klippel’s return to Sydney in 1963 where he continued to work with junk machine parts unmoved by the advent of minimal and conceptual trends in sculpture. For the last three decades of his life, Klippel worked out of separate studio-rooms in his harbourside home in the suburb of Birchgrove, engaging in the different activities of drawing, collage, welding, woodwork, clay modeling and plastic assemblage that responded to the creative principles he had established decades earlier.