Inge KING

German/English/Australian 1915–2016

Black sun, 1974, represents the directional change in Inge King’s art after she finished her monumental commission from the building committee of the Victorian Arts Centre in 1974 for Forward surge, now erected in the Victorian Arts Centre lawn.

Black sun is the third and final version of the maquettes for the major sculpture of the same name. The maquette was made in an edition of four, plus an artist’s proof, of which this is edition number one and the artist’s proof or one of this edition was exhibited in Inge King’s 1977 solo exhibition at Realities Gallery, Melbourne. The finished sculpture is monumental in size and made of black painted steel. It is in an edition of two, one of which is in the collection of Mildura Arts Centre and the other in the collection of the Australian National University.

The theme of the circular disc standing on end became a major one in King’s art in the mid 1970s. The artist realised the potential this form had for monumentality, which can be seen in the maquette that she has successfully scaled up into the finished sculpture. Inge King made several trips to Japan in the mid 1970s where her daughter was studying. The artist was attracted to the refinement and clarity of traditional Japanese temple architecture and to the massive scale of temple gates and other ceremonial architectural forms. As Judith Trimble points out in her definitive monograph, Inge King Sculptor, 1996, the bland geometry of minimalism was not to be tolerated by the artist. She and her husband, the painter and printmaker Grahame King, travelled extensively from the late 1960s, seeing the minimalist sculptures of Americans like Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, and reviewing the superb abstract, welded metal forms of David Smith. King, who studied in Germany and Great Britain, has described her sculpture as romantic and emotional. The artist coaxes subtle curves and shifts out of uncompromising sheet metal, which soften the geometry of the disc that in turn is slit vertically so that light—sunlight—pierces it, depending on the angle of viewing.

Jennifer Phipps