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Lot Essay
Before moving to New York in 1963, Clement Meadmore had already established a strong reputation in Australia for his abstract steel sculptures. Untitled is representative of these early works, which display a strong, almost brutal instinct in their form, enlivened by Meadmore's capacity to imbue vitality through planar structure and surface texture.
"Surface texture disquiets", wrote John Hershaw in a 1962 review of Meadmore's work, "As if one were looking at the sweating walls of a crypt, uniformly black bubbled and repellent. The forms have as it were tired of these inherent orders and are imperceptibly trying to grow an animal skin. In this summing up of contrasts or contradictions Meadmore touches a central mystery, the longing of contemporary civilisation to combine the security of ruthless logic with the maximum of sensuality and self-abandon." (J. Hershaw in K. Scarlett, Australian Sculptors, Melbourne, 1980, p.431).
"Surface texture disquiets", wrote John Hershaw in a 1962 review of Meadmore's work, "As if one were looking at the sweating walls of a crypt, uniformly black bubbled and repellent. The forms have as it were tired of these inherent orders and are imperceptibly trying to grow an animal skin. In this summing up of contrasts or contradictions Meadmore touches a central mystery, the longing of contemporary civilisation to combine the security of ruthless logic with the maximum of sensuality and self-abandon." (J. Hershaw in K. Scarlett, Australian Sculptors, Melbourne, 1980, p.431).