Art Ew - National Gallery of Australia

(left to right)
Jannis Kounellis Untitled
1990 (detail) three steel
panels, clothes and beams
each 200.0 x 181.0 x 25.0 cm
Purchased 1992; Louise
Bourgeois C.O.Y.O.T.E.
1941–48 painted wood
137.4 x 214.5 x 28.9 cm
Purchased 1981; Robert
Klippel No. 757 painted
wood construction
1988–89 painted wood
253.0 x 171.0 x 146.0 cm
Purchased 1989; Donald
Judd Untitled 1974 brass
each 101.6 x 101.6 x 101.6 cm
Purchased 1975;
Anselm Kiefer La Vie
secrète des plantes [The
secret life of plants] 2002
lead, oil, chalk, pigment
195.0 x 300.0 (diameter) cm
Purchased 2003;
Robert Smithson Rocks and
mirror square II 1971 basalt
rocks and mirrors
36.0 x 220.0 x 220.0 cm
Purchased 1977; Anselm
Kiefer Abendland [Twilight
of the West] 1989 lead
sheet, synthetic polymer
paint, ash, plaster, cement,
earth, varnish on canvas and
wood 400.0 x 380.0 x 12.0 cm
Purchased 1989
10 national gallery of australia
Both Robert Klippel and Rosalie Gascoigne
collected and re-used wooden objects. Klippel plays
with architectonic elements in No. 757 Painted wood
construction 1988–89 to create a new reality, based on
manufactured things but now useful only as art. The
weatherbeaten panels of Gascoigne’s Plenty 1986 are
made of recycled box slats. The installation shines on a
dull grey concrete wall, its golden hues and title perhaps
implying fields of wheat or blond grass stretching out
before our eyes.
The earliest work on display is Elie Nadelman’s Horse
c. 1911–15, which seems to gallop into the gallery. The
animal’s sturdy body, carved from white plaster, balances
on its absurdly delicate thoroughbred legs. The modernist
sculptor’s impulse to pure form is taken to its ultimate
abstract end in Brancusi’s black marble and white marble
Birds in space of 1931–36. They embody the idea of flight,
an upward striving which separates the earthbound from
the free. Purchased from the sculptor by the Maharajah of
Indore, the works were originally meant to be installed in a
pavilion designed by Brancusi. Their current placement on
simple geometric sandstone bases in a silent pool is based
on a similar idea of contemplation and reflection.
Combining stone and metal is unusual, because of
possible contradictions between the methods of carving
or casting employed by the sculptor. Anthony Caro’s
Duccio variations no. 7 2000 is a promised gift from Ken
Tyler and Maribeth Cohen through the American Friends
of the Australian National Gallery. When Caro was invited
to respond to a painting in the collection of the National
Gallery, London, he made seven works in different
materials. Each was based on Duccio’s Annunciation 1311,
but responds to the painter’s depiction of architecture
rather than the traditional subject. Here Caro assembles a
new altarpiece with pieces of golden sandstone and found
metal objects, painted gunmetal grey-blue.
Max Ernst’s giant bronze Habakuk is a major new
acquisition, purchased with the help of the National
Australia Bank. It is a curious figure, conjuring up thoughts
of birds, or reptiles, even partly machine or human. Ernst
was a major Surrealist sculptor: this is a large version of
an original work which he made in plaster in 1934, and
reworked later that decade. A small edition in this size was
authorised by the artist in 1970. His alter-ego was a birdman
called Loplop. Habakuk’s body was created from casts
of flowerpots, stacked on top of and inside one another.