Norma REDPATH

Australian 1928–2013
worked in Italy 1974–85

After studying art at Swinburne Technical College and RMIT, Norma Redpath travelled and studied extensively in Europe. By the end of the 1950s her sculpture was established in its trademark style of immaculate finish and smooth, organic forms. She was one of the Centre Five group of contemporary Melbourne artists who associated sculpture with architecture. From the late 1950s, the artist received monumental sculptural commissions, the best-known is the fountain outside the Treasury Building in Canberra. In 1962 Redpath was in Milan on an Italian Government Travelling Scholarship. From that time she lived and worked in Italy, returning frequently to Australia. She had first used lost-wax bronze casting in Rome in 1957. In Milan she immeasurably increased her skills, learning how an artist works with a skilled foundry team at the Fonderia d’Arte Battaglia. Horse, bird and sun, 1963, was first exhibited at Gallery A in Melbourne in 1963 in Norma Redpath: Recent Sculpture which showed the bronzes she made in Milan. The scale is monumental, although the piece itself is quite small. The catalogue for Redpath’s Gallery A exhibition defines it as a bronzetti: ‘Bronzetti differ from sketches or working models in that they are complete small sculptures and form a distinct class … Like sketches, they can be expanded to large scale sculpture, as some of these have been, but they are primarily considered as finished works.’

While catalogue number 10 is this bronzetti, catalogue number 17, also called Horse, bird and sun, now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is listed under large-scale works. It is three times the size of the bronzetti. The sun is present as light seen through the raised bronze bird and sky. In 1966, after a subsequent exhibition and large commissions, Norma Redpath wrote: ‘As much as it is possible for an artist to analyse his work, especially that closest to him in time, I am aware of certain factors. From the early carving years when I used an abstraction of natural forms, abstract symbolism then a fusion of both, “form fragments” began to emerge from this work establishing a sort of language which I am still using’. By 1966 Redpath considered her forms non-objective.

Jennifer Phipps