Clement Meadmore

Clement Meadmore was an Australian-American sculptor whose distinctive works found a middle ground between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. He described his primary interest as being in “geometry as a grammar”, a visual language of forms that could be subtly moulded and adapted to evoke new aesthetic experiences. His large-scale sculptures in COR-TEN steel took the form of a rectangular prism twisted into organic forms that resemble everything from tree branches to human figures in a process that takes the solidest material available and makes it rubbery and flexible.

Born in Melbourne in 1929, Meadmore’s uncle, Jesse Jewhurst Hilder (1881-1916) was an Australian watercolourist influenced by Corot’s Barbizon School. His mother exposed Meadmore to ballet and, through him, Edgar Degas. He studied aeronautical engineering at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (1949) before designing furniture of welded steel, which he began selling in 1953. That same year, he travelled to England, France and Germany, where his first contacts with European modern and abstract art compelled him to a unique sculptural style. 

After several solo shows in Melbourne and Sydney in the late-1950s and early-1960s, Meadmore moved to New York in 1963 where he lived and worked for the majority of his life. From the late-1960s, he began making his distinctive, large-scale steel sculptures, including a large number of commissions and site-specific pieces. The solidity of the steel mixed with the organic curvature of his forms made his sculptures perfect for urban parks and courtyards to connect the architectural and natural spaces.

Meadmore exhibited for over fifty years in Australia and internationally, including extensively throughout the United States. His sculptures can be seen at important landmarks and universities across the world, including at Columbia University, New York; Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, the Art Institute of Chicago; the Adachi Museum of Art, Yasugi, Japan; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, Japan. Most recently, the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne staged Clement Meadmore: The art of mid-century design (2019) to celebrate Meadmore’s contribution to furniture design and the interaction between that and his more widely known sculptural oeuvre.