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Lot 41
Robert Klippel(1920-2001)No. 686, 1987 height: 65.0cm (25 9/16in).
Amended
21 March 2021, 14:00 AEDT
Melbourne, ArmadaleSold for AU$18,450 inc. premium
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Merryn Schriever
Managing Director, Australia
Robert Klippel (1920-2001)
No. 686, 1987
initialled, numbered and dated to side: 'RK 686 1987'
wood assemblage
height: 65.0cm (25 9/16in).
initialled, numbered and dated to side: 'RK 686 1987'
wood assemblage
height: 65.0cm (25 9/16in).
Footnotes
PROVENANCE
Collection of Andrew Klippel, Sydney
The Lucio's Collection, Sydney
LITERATURE
Deborah Edwards, Robert Klippel, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002, CD-ROM
In 1964 fellow artist and friend Colin Lanceley discovered a huge trove of wooden machine pattern-parts in a Balmain store once occupied by the Morts Ship Building firm. Lanceley and Klippel's excitement was palpable. Superbly crafted, 'the wooden patterns (were) once made for sandcasting maritime machinery parts, some of them dating to the beginning of the century when virtually all machinery was cast.' 1 With forms for the production of sprockets and rotors, flywheels and cogs, the patterns were to be a wellspring of inspiration for both artists. After transferring the thousands of pieces to their studios, Lanceley commenced work immediately, though it would be 20 years before Klippel engaged with the material. It wasn't until 1980 when the National Gallery of Australia commissioned a series of outdoor sculptures, the resulting works now installed in the Sculpture Garden, that Klippel fully engaged with the pattern-parts in his Birchgrove store.
As noted by Deborah Edwards, 'Klippel's beginning was his end. His large series of wooden pattern-part sculptures reiterates processes and principles that were in place in 1948. The last 15 years of his life saw a return to wood – a material he had now used since the 1940s – in yet another extraordinary outpouring of activity which resulted in a series of over 150 assemblages.' 2
Working by hand, Klippel started by filling imperfections in the parts, then sanding the painted surfaces back, reducing the yellow, red and black sections into softer, cloudy hues and raw wood. 'The process of 'chance' operating in the assemblage of these works appears to have been mediated by Klippel's culling of his 'field' of parts. The wooden sculptures seem constituted of largely geometric solids, yet the captured pattern pieces also incorporated many of the 'organic' forms (curved, bulging, circular, tubular and serpentine sections) which Colin Lanceley used to create his own assemblages in 1964-65, with a sinewy organicism that can be related to the fluid arabesques of painterly form. It is significant that Klippel subverted such parts and sections in his assemblages for the creation of sculptural rhythms that are muscular, formidable, ponderous and geometricist in their foundation.' 3
1. Robert Hughes in William Wright, Colin Lanceley, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1993, p. 12
2. Deborah Edwards, Robert Klippel, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002, p. 187
3. Ibid, p. 191
Saleroom notices
The literature should read:
Deborah Edwards, Robert Klippel: Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture, CD-ROM, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002 as 'No. 686'