Klippel with assemblages in his studio
Number 1060, (1995) painted wire, tin 22.5 x 7.6 x 7cm
Number 714 - Prototype for Adelaide Plaza (1988) Construction of brazed and welded steel, geometric sections, found objects, formed sheet metal. 69.5 x 64 x 49.5 cm without base
Number 329, (1977) assemblage of collected wood parts 300 x 350 x 135cm
search @www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au
A Klippel's practice exeplifies the interconnectedness of the conceptual and the material. His bodies of work explore the relationship between the organic and the mechanical.
B By the time Robert Klippel died in Sydney in 2001, aged 81, he was critically acclaimed and well collected in his home country. But as with most Australian artists, although he had lived for stints in Europe and the US from the 1940s until the 1960s, his work was largely unknown abroad.
Eleven years on, his son has secured a blue chip shot at changing that. Klippel junior has signed Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich as the sole representative of his father’s estate worldwide, catapulting the artist into the company of Pablo Picasso, Yves Klein, Alexander Rodchenko and David Smith, whose estates the gallery also represents.
Some of Klippel’s large wooden sculptures have already been on the Gmurzynska stand at Art Basel, Art Basel Miami and ArtHK, and a substantial publication and exhibition is being planned for the coming year.
Klippel is the only Australian artist to have been taken on by the 50-year-old gallery, which is best known for introducing the Russian avant garde to western Europe and for representing modernist artists working up to 1980.
“We have a solid reputation for scientific research, and for promoting interesting, important historic figures who have created something authentic but who have not had the exposure they should have had,” says gallery co-owner Mathias Rastorfer.
Klippel, an abstract artist and loner not easily slotted into one particular movement, was loosely influenced by surrealism, cubism and constructivism.
According to Deborah Edwards in the 2002 Art Gallery of NSW retrospective catalogue, “his attitudes to art making were grounded in European modernism and postwar intellectual thought”. It is for this reason, in part, that Gmurzynska was interested in taking him on.
Rastorfer says: “We found him very interesting due to his connection to the constructivists, his Polish origins, his time in America. The more you go into Klippel, the more modernist links you find.
“We will introduce his work in the context of those peers, taking him out of the Australian context and putting him into an international one. We want to show where he fits in worldwide.”
Klippel’s bronze sculptures have been the most collectable in Australia. They appear regularly on the secondary market and can fetch more than $100,000. The top price paid at auction – $507,800 – was in 2006 for a miniature steel, tin, acrylic paint and coloured paper collage.
Gmurzynska plans to use the large, wooden sculptures and tiny coloured plastic ones that Klippel did in the late 1980s and early 1990s to introduce him internationally. This is in part for practical reasons, because this is most of what is left in the estate, but also because he thinks these will work best there.
Rastorfer expects to take at least three years to achieve traction internationally for Klippel. “One of the biggest temptations is to sell the four or five most important works straight away, because that’s the easiest thing to do,” he says. “But then the estate is left with the lesser known work and often doesn’t know what to do with it.
“It’s about placement in museum collections, in significant private collections, and with opinion makers, not just about selling. If we show him in the context of his better- known peers, the rest will follow.”
There are no guarantees the strategy will work, but Andrew Klippel is quietly excited that his father, to whom he was very close, is getting a posthumous chance at an international career.
After years in the music business, where things happen very quickly, his foray into the visual arts is teaching him a new virtue: patience. “This is a long play.”
Katrina Strickland http://www.afr.com (2012)
