Clement Meadmore
Clement Meadmore (1929 - 2005) was born in Australia but spent most of his life in the USA.
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. Meadmore moved to New York in 1963 at the age of 34 and later became a United States citizen. Meadmore lived and worked in New York.
In his sculpture, Meadmore endowed a single form with clarity and rigor, while at the same time he conveyed the complexity, expressiveness and dynamics of classic modernist sculpture which underlay Meadmore's pursuit of a gestural or "drawn" character for his sculpture. Aside from matters of proportion, his work acquired a monumental scale and a mode of address that engaged in rather than detached from the frankly public, occasionally heroic voice it adopted.
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.
Meadmore was one of the first sculptors to work with COR-TEN steel, which became his preferred medium. He admired the natural, rusted patina of this steel which, in this case, gives the impression of an industrial beam, no longer of any use and left to rot on a vacant block. In the studio of his apartment, he built small maquettes which were no more than 30 cm long. If he saw that the maquettes had potential to be translated on a monumental scale, he would have the works manufactured as large sculptures by a local fabrication plant. His powerful but spare works were often fabricated at Lippincott, Inc., in Connecticut, a plant that was specially developed to strictly produce works of art.
Image : "ELABORATION" 1997 bronze 20 x 40 x 20 cm
Courtesy of the estate of the artist & Robin Gibson Gallery (Sydney)
