CLEMENT MEADMORE

Private collection, Luxembourg

Good condition. Surface marks, paint losses on edges and compression marks and paint losses on corners.
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In the early 20th century, Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonzales pioneered 'open-form' sculpture, a new and radically modern approach to three-dimensional construction, with wiry lines describing the depths and margins of spatial voids. Against this innovation, the solid masses of traditional 'closed-form' sculpture began to seem somehow old-fashioned. However, in America in the 1960s the power of the monolith was reasserted: in David Smith's Cubi of 1962, in the geometric solids of Donald Judd and Robert Morris's minimalism, and in the twisted cubic strictures of the expatriate Australian Clement Meadmore.¹

Big, grave and carefully balanced, Meadmore's sculptures reflect influences diverse as his background in industrial design and furniture making, the curves of Art Nouveau architectural decoration, sturdy iron-age megaliths, and the refined abstract paintings of his friend Barnett Newman.

The present work is a maquette (in the then-innovative materials of polystyrene and polyurethane) for Awakening, an eight-metre monument in Cor-Ten steel that sits in the plaza of the AMP Building in Melbourne. Eric Gibson has written of Meadmore's work: 'Besides the gestural and musical energies...that animate Meadmore's sculpture, there is their ability to express physical energy, the feeling of the human body in motion. Most often the association is of the body straining against itself, as in a bronze ballerina by Degas. This quality is apparent throughout Meadmore's work and is reinforced by titles such as Awakening and Push Up.'²  This quality of muscular animation makes Awakening one of Melbourne's best known and most handsome public sculptures.

1. See Eric Gibson, The sculpture of Clement Meadmore, Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1994, p. 42
2. ibid., pp. 100, 108