Clement Meadmore
(b Melbourne, 9 Feb 1929). Australian sculptor and designer, active in the USA. He studied aeronautical engineering and later industrial design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, but left without finishing the course. From 1949 to 1953 he worked as an industrial designer, specializing in furniture. Marketed widely in Australia during these years, his furniture was distinguished by its simplicity. It was constructed with plain, undisguised materials such as steel rods, timber laminates and cord; his tables, chairs and shelving systems exercised a delight in linear and open structure that conveyed an impression of virtual weightlessness. In his free time Meadmore began to produce sculptures, carving wooden shapes whose forms were similar to those of tensioned strings, and from 1950 to 1953 experimenting with mobiles. After extensive travel in 1953 in Europe, where he was particularly impressed by modern sculptures that he saw in Belgium, he produced his first large abstract sculptures in welded steel. Some of these, for example Duolith III (steel, h. 1.26 m, 1962; Melbourne, N.G. Victoria) were influenced by photographs of the prehistoric sites of Carnac, Stonehenge and Avebury, most obviously in their textured surfaces and in the monolithic quality of their massive, perpendicular steel slabs. From 1959 to 1961 Meadmore was Director of Gallery A in Melbourne, before moving to Sydney. In 1959 he visited Japan, where he saw an exhibition of modern American painting that included works by Mark Tobey, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko; he was especially struck by Newman's work. He continued to work in welded metal until he moved in 1963 to the USA, where he met Newman and came under the spell of the monumental, geometrical sculpture then being produced there. Working in Cor-Ten steel he simplified his forms and began to use curves in his sculptures, as in Bent (steel, h. 0.87 m, 1966; Melbourne, Joseph Brown Gal.). He developed this style in such dynamic works as Fling (1971; see 1971 exh. cat.), using long, extensively twisted, square-faced elements. He also made many huge public sculptures, such as Dervish (1975; Melbourne, N.G. Victoria), in which it appears that huge rectangular blocks have been convoluted under pressure from colossal, unseen forces.
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