Robert KLIPPEL

Australian 1920–2001
worked in United States 1958–63

Robert Klippel chose junk, metal pieces and machine parts to make his sculptures. In 1963 and 1964 the artist accumulated a large amount of metal parts from IBM computers and the National Cash Register Company. To make a sculpture Klippel studied the machine parts, seeking to find within each one its own energy, direction and dynamic. Although Klippel said he was not a surrealist, he nevertheless made his art according to the Surrealist aesthetic of the found object. This consists of taking something already made or manufactured, or created in nature, using its form to give it a different meaning; in Klippel’s case, attaching and simultaneously liberating utilitarian metal scrap within his own sculpture. No. 255, 1970, is both a serious abstract sculpture where the disparate parts are brilliantly brought into equilibrium, and a capriccio. The void at the centre of the ring and the abstract corona of metal machine parts also suggest a play on a classic form in Western sculpture: the halo of the saint, the portrait bust, the sunflower. James Gleeson, the painter and close colleague of Klippel’s, writes that No. 255, is the last of a series where Klippel simplifies his machine-part assemblages into a basic sculptural geometry of a circle on a vertical stand.

From the circle of found metal, metal arms, keys from typewriters, calculators, cash registers and connecting parts from engines are flung out in a decorative and vertiginous circle. Irregularly welded to the metal circle, the metal tentacles twist and writhe with dynamic energy. Viewed from the side, it is a bristling column; from the front, a volume of space arrayed with organic and simultaneously mechanical and abstract forms. Robert Klippel attended art schools and technical schools sporadically, in part due to the disruption of World War II, during which his expertise in constructing scale models of ships and aeroplanes was used for training gunners. In the 1940s he spent three years sculpting, drawing and exhibiting in London and Paris, where surrealist and abstract artists admired his art. He spent three periods in America, teaching sculpture in Minneapolis and making and exhibiting sculpture there and in New York. As James Gleeson points out in his 1983 monograph on the artist, Klippel’s drawings and collages of the 1950s are the purest form of abstract expressionism in Australia.

Klippel lived in Sydney permanently from 1967. He is the most acclaimed twentieth-century sculptor in Australia.

Jennifer Phipps