Labelled Australia’s Picasso for his exploration of abstract forms, Robert Klippel is one of Australia’s most highly acclaimed sculptors. Standing over 3 metres high with a length of 3.5 metres, Bronze Sculpture No. 714 is the culmination of forty years of research into the mechanical aspects of industrial equipment.
It brings together an array of bronze castings of wooden pattern-making tools. Each element comes together to create an asymmetrical yet balanced whole.
Bronze Sculpture No. 714 embodies what James Gleeson noted as one of the basic drives in Klippel’s art: ‘to achieve an aesthetically fruitful union of mechanical and organic forms’.
Klippel was born in Sydney in 1920 and educated at Sydney Grammar School and East Sydney Technical College. At East Sydney Tech, he worked under Lyndon Dadswell, the artist behind the 1959 sculpture, Progress, which is located in Rundle Mall.
