Sculptor, was born at Potts Point, Sydney, on 19 June 1920, son of a successful businessman. He was educated at Cranbrook and Sydney Grammar and studied art at East Sydney Technical College. During WWII he served in minesweepers and as a gunner on a tanker, then was transferred to making scale models of ships for the Royal Australian Navy to use in recognition training. This led to a new interest in sculpture, beginning with monumental carved stone figures and changing in the 1940s to surrealist works. 'His sculptures and drawings completed in London and Paris in the 1940s are among the finest products of postwar European surrealism’, Edwards states. Influenced by Zen and Indian philosophies in the 1950s.
It was not until Klippel went to New York in 1957 and later, while teaching at the Minnesota School of Arts, that his talents began to be appreciated. After periods living in NY in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where his contemporaries included the giants of abstract expressionism, he settled in Birchgrove, Balmain, and began making the 1960s and ’70s spectacular non-figurative junk assemblages – monumental civic sculptures and intimately scale metal and plastic assemblages – for which he is best known.
In 1979 a solo exhibition at Sydney was a sell-out, with prices up to $18,000 and for many years before he died, on his 81st birthday, he was unquestionably Australia’s most celebrated sculptor. An exhibition of his large assemblages was held at Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1995. 30 small metal sculptures on show at Watters when he died (his dealer was Frank Watters), all made within the past 12 months, were of equal quality to any of his work. Deborah Edwards was preparing a retrospective when he died, on his 81st birthday.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2012
