Clement Meadmore Biography

While a young artist, his work was highly regarded and he was awarded a number of exhibitions, including several one-person shows in Melbourne and Sydney, where he lived from 1960. Meadmore moved to New York in 1963 at the age of 34 and later became a United States citizen. With the exception of a year spent in Australia, as photo editor for Vogue magazine, Meadmore has lived and worked in New York.

In his sculpture, Meadmore endows a single form with clarity and rigor, while at the same time conveys the complexity, expressiveness and dynamics of classic modernist sculpture which underlies Meadmore’s pursuit of a gestural or “drawn” character for his sculpture. Aside from matters of proportion, his work acquires a monumental scale and a mode of address that is engaged in rather than detached from the frankly public, occasionally heroic voice it adopts.

In a typical sculpture by Clement Meadmore, a single, rectangular volume repeatedly twists and turns upon itself before lunging into space, as if in a mood of aspiration or exhilaration, or simply to release physical forces held in tension. Meadmore’s works have always fused elements of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Since Meadmore’s sculptures are often large, this impression of effortless physical grace is simultaneously underscored and called into question through the fluid signature like immediacy of their physicality.

The combination of Minimalism’s ascendancy in the 1960’s and its uncompromising reductiveness precipitated a kind of crisis of values for Meadmore, giving him the resolve to move beyond Minimalism by establishing a set of variant aesthetic terms to work with and against. Indeed, despite superficial similarities with minimalism including, their formal clarity, their basis in geometry, their preference for smooth, uninflected surfaces, and, above all in their penchant for single, unitary forms – Meadmore’s sculptures express ideas and feelings beyond their factual presence. Unlike the minimalists, Meadmore never begins with an idea developed in advance. His compositions are arrived at intuitively.

Meadmore has said, “I am interested in geometry as a grammar which, if understood, can be used with great flexibility and expressiveness.” But Meadmore has gone farther. His starting point was geometry, a language or “grammar” that is both rigorously structured and conceptual in nature – a construct of the mind – and therefore intangible. He has evolved a method that has transformed geometry into something pliant and plastic. In his hands geometry has acquired an expressive suppleness and materiality more typical of such conventional and palpable media as wood and clay. To borrow his own phrase, Meadmore has in his work “transcended geometry,” thus placing the stamp of his individual vision on one of the primary modes of twentieth century art.

Meadmore has explored variations of elongated, squared metal tubes in a majority of his works. In the mid-1970s, his sculptures became more complex; the single bar divided, moving into multiple directions while the surfaces remained understated, painted a matte black or left to rust. “Offshoot” is an example of that development, as a single, squared tube twists upward to join a massive horizontal section which then divides and turns once more. An illusion of lightness is created as the dark horizontal piece balances effortlessly in spite of its weight and length of twenty-four feet.

Meadmore is represented in collections at major museums in Australia, as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum and others in the United States and Japan. Large-scale sculptures have been installed on college campuses throughout the USA, including Princeton University. In his spare time, Meadmore liked to play the drums and to make jazz with his friends.

Clement Meadmore died in New York City on April 19, 2005