ROBERT KLIPPEL

Klippel attended the East Sydney Technical College (1944-46) and studied at the Slade School of Art in London 1947, later travelling to Paris and meeting with a number of Surrealist artists and exhibiting with André Breton( 1949). Working in stone and wood, Klippel’s early work revealed his awareness of European modernism and African art, and a commitment to capturing the essence of his subjects.

He travelled to New York in 1957, taking up a teaching position at the Minneapolis School of Art and beginning to explore the potential of welded metals, developing a body of work that he exhibited in Sydney in 1963. Fundamental to these and earlier sculptures was an adherence to seeking out the underlying principles and qualities of forms and materials, with the configuration of his organic machinery sculptures, advocating a reconciliation of opposites and philosophical and aesthetic associations between seemingly disparate objects.

Klippel has works in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney.