Clement Meadmore

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Clement Meadmore

Australian, 1929-2005

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Birth LocationAustralia

Active InUnited States

BiographyClement Meadmore (February 9, 1929 - April 19, 2005) was born in
Melbourne, Australia. As a boy, Meadmore was strongly impressed by
his mother's interest in the work of an uncle, Jesse Jewhurst Hilder
(1881-1916), an Australian watercolorist in the style of Corot. She also
instilled an interest in ballet and, first among artists, Edgar Degas.
Meadmore originally studied aeronautical engineering at the Royal
Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. After graduating in
1949, he designed furniture until 1953 when his first sculpture of
welded steel was offered for sale. In 1953 he traveled to England,
France and Germany, then in 1959 visited Japan.
While a young artist, his work was highly regarded and he was awarded
a number of exhibitions, including several one-person shows in
Melbourne and Sydney, where he lived since 1960. Meadmore moved to
New York in 1963 at the age of 34 and later became a United States
citizen. With the exception of a year spent in Australia, as photo editor
for Vogue magazine, Meadmore lived and worked in New York.
Meadmore once said, "I am interested in geometry as a grammar which,
if understood, can be used with great flexibility and expressiveness."
But Meadmore went farther. His starting point was geometry, a
language or "grammar" that is both rigorously structured and conceptual
in nature - a construct of the mind - and therefore intangible. He
evolved a method that transformed geometry into something pliant and
plastic. In his hands geometry acquired an expressive suppleness and
materiality more typical of such conventional and palpable media as
wood and clay. To borrow his own phrase, Meadmore in his work
"transcended geometry," thus placing the stamp of his individual vision
on one of the primary modes of twentieth century art.

Meadmore was one of the first sculptors to work with COR-TEN steel,
which became his preferred medium. He admired the natural, rusted
patina of this steel which, in this case, gives the impression of an
industrial beam, no longer of any use and left to rot on a vacant block.
In the studio of his apartment, he built small maquettes which were no
more than 30 cm long. If he saw that the maquettes had potential to be
translated on a monumental scale, he would have the works
manufactured as large sculptures by a local fabrication plant. His
powerful but spare works were often fabricated at Lippincott, Inc., in
Connecticut, a plant that was specially developed to strictly produce
works of art.
--From the artist's website, meadmore.com

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