Robert Klippel

Episode of Series “The Painters, the sculptors: archival art series”.
Robert Klippel is viewed as one of Australia’s most important artists of the fifties and sixties. His humble beginnings (and obsession) with ship modelmaking was to influence and inform his work throughout his career as an artist. Klippel was a self-taught artist whose interest sprung from the processes he’d developed while model building, a scale which was to continue in his work throughout his career. Klippel had a strong preference for the solid built form of sculpture but found his work naturally becoming more linear in style. His developed language in the fifties and his need for intellectual peers saw him travel to Europe and New York to again resettle in Sydney, Australia where he developed strong artistic allies and his notoriety as an abstract expressionist artist along with Olsen and Passmore. This documentary charts Klippel’s role in a developing cultural nation.