Symphonic: Robert Klippel at TarraWarra

ASSEMBLED: The Art of Robert Klippel, exhibition installation view, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 2019–20; courtesy the Robert Klippel Estate, represented by Annette Larkin Fine Art, Sydney, and Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich; © Andrew Klippel; photo: Andrew Curtis

Stepping into ‘ASSEMBLED’, the current survey of Robert Klippel’s vast range of sculptures, drawings and collages at TarraWarra Museum of Art in Melbourne’s Yarra Valley, is a bit like walking into a concert hall with the orchestra playing at full pitch. There are the deep booms of the timpani and the smaller lighter notes of flute and triangle, with the overall rhythm and movement of the piece pushing through space with all the power of a steam train – to unashamedly mix metaphors in the same way as Klippel would mix found objects with the industrial processes that had long ago first breathed life into them. Tiny clothes peg-like sculptures of twisted metal and multicoloured wire are lined up in vitrines, casting faint shadows like a faux army of miniature terracotta warriors. Contrast them with the monumental sculptures assembled from found objects, and parts of other objects, often silhouetted against the rolling green Healesville landscape outside that, under blue skies, presses in for a closer look through the large plate-glass windows, high as a double-decker bus.

These ‘Great Wood Sculptures’ – as Geoffrey Legge, co-founder of Watters Gallery in Sydney and longtime friend of the artist, calls them – really dominate TarraWarra’s lofty gallery spaces. They astonish. Legge likens Klippel’s vocabulary of forms to Shakespeare. Deborah Edwards is another big fan. She curated Klippel’s major exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2002 (he died in June of the previous year). In her biographical notes for the catalogue essay we discover much of the backstory to his personal grammar, syntax and Shakespearean breadth: there is his childhood in Sydney’s Potts Point with its daily changing landscape of merchant and naval vessels; and his early training and employment in the wool industry (his family had a textile business). Later, after working on a minesweeper during the Second World War, he lived and worked in London (befriending James Gleeson), Paris (he came to know André Breton and the remaining circle of surrealists) and New York (also inspiring a generation of students at the Minneapolis School of Art).

Klippel was 42 before he had his first solo exhibition in Sydney at Clunes Gallery, returning to Australia in 1962 with a container of 19 ‘junk metal’ sculptures. Eventually, over the following decades, his output would total over 1200 sculptures and countless drawings and collages. When I view these at TarraWarra, I am reminded by turns of Luna Park fairgrounds and the inspirational sculptures of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Klippel, however, went beyond the experiments of this seminal twentieth-century artist when he declared in 1945: ‘sculpture must be revolutionised without the figure.’

Kirsty Grant, the formidable curator of this exhibition, has for my money created one of the highlights of the 2020 season so far, taking us deeper into the experimentation and the craft that went into Klippel’s late twentieth-century sunburst of creativity.

Peter Hill, Healesville