Inge King: A tribute

(born Berlin, November 26, 1915, died Melbourne, April 23, 2016)

Inge King, one of Australia's most significant sculptors, died on Saturday night, after having suffered a stroke three days earlier. She was aged 100.

Ingeborg Neufeld was born in Berlin, the youngest of four daughters, into a comfortable middle-class, German-Jewish family whose economic fortunes dipped dramatically during the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic years. Her father died while she was in her early teens and the family struggled to make ends meet. Although she excelled at school and wanted to go to university, there was not enough money, so she settled on her second choice, art school, and enrolled in the Vereinigten Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst in Berlin where, from the outset, she was drawn to sculpture, rather than painting. At the age of 20, she sought out one of her heroines, the great German sculptor and printmaker of the day, Kathe Kollwitz, and was invited by her to spend an afternoon with her. On hearing that Inge wanted to be a sculptor, Kollwitz cautioned her: "don't do it, unless you absolutely have to, as it is so difficult" and, as King later observed, "she was quite right, but I never regretted it".

In Berlin she began her studies with the Dresden-trained sculptor, Hermann Nonnenmacher, who between 1936 and 1937 taught her carving and modelling and then she commenced her studies at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts in 1937. Of the sculptors, apart from Kollwitz, her other great heroes were Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Ernst Barlach. King recalls that when she was an adolescent, the family identified themselves as German, rather than Jewish, but the ascent of Adolf Hitler saw her excluded from the Berlin Academy in 1938 because of her Jewish origins. Her mother and two of her siblings left Germany, but Inge King stayed until Kristallnacht in November 1938. By this time, friends had organised a British visa for her and she fled to London. Her youngest sister did not manage to escape in time and perished.

King continued her training in London and Glasgow, and in 1944 married a Czech doctor, Karel Winter. The marriage lasted for less than three years and she returned to London where, while resident at the Abbey Arts Centre, she met the brilliant Australian printmaker and painter, Grahame King. They were married in June 1950. Inge King had already received some recognition for early exhibitions and lived and exhibited in New York, where she met several leading artists of the New York School, including Alexander Calder, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, while Walter Gropius became an early mentor. However, Grahame could not obtain a working visa for America and the couple could not survive on Inge's scholarship for Chicago, so they decided to return to Grahame's home town of Melbourne.

The Kings arrived in Melbourne in January 1951, where they settled for the rest of their lives. In a memorable turn of phrase, Inge described her first impressions of Melbourne as "like a can of flat beer", but later stoically reflected: "I was sad not to go to America, but once the decision was made, I never regretted it, I never regretted it." Their two daughters, Joanna and Angela were born in 1953 and 1955 respectively and the family moved to rural Warrandyte, on the outskirts of Melbourne, where they started to build their Robyn Boyd-designed house.

In Inge King's development as a sculptor in Australia, there were several false starts and even more interruptions thrown up by life before a suitable medium was determined and a technology mastered. Subsequently, she managed to establish her own independent artistic identity, which reflected the zeitgeist, but maintained an individual, distinctive and "a feminine voice". She mastered the formalist language without becoming a formulaic formalist. She once reflected: "Calder and Klippel were men, their sculpture was based more on engineering principles, while as a woman my work is basically different with a more organic mode of thought. I am not saying that one is better than the other, but it is a basically different approach."

Like few sculptors in Australia, Inge King was committed to public sculpture, producing pieces that have become iconic in Australian art, including Forward Surge (1976), Sun ribbon (1980-82), Shearwater (1995), Sentinel (2000) and Rings of Saturn (2006), all in Melbourne. Outside Melbourne, Canberra has attracted some of her most significant public sculptures. These include the RAAF Memorial (1973) on Anzac Parade, a brilliant and original monument that proved controversial with some members of the conservative military establishment; the Black Sun (1975) that was acquired by the Australian National University and has become a distinguishing landmark on campus, near University House; and the walk-through sculpture, Temple gate (1976-77) at the National Gallery of Australia, which has become one of the highlights of the gallery's sculpture garden. Throughout Australia, her sculptures have transformed our urban landscape and have proved to be people magnets, as the sculptures invite active interaction with viewers. People are enticed to walk through the sculptures, peer through their various openings and angles and occasionally even skate on them – they are sculptures that have been designed to be inhabited, to be used by people in their daily journeys.

Inge King's creative process was a strange mixture that included intuitive serendipity, deliberate intent and persistent application. She was an artist who spent much of her life in her studio, quite often playing with small models made out of balsawood which were mounted on rotating stands on which they were examined from every possible angle. Sometimes, over a period of months, she would subtly alter them before a decision was made, whether the piece was worthy of progressing to a metal maquette stage. She frequently worked in series, where one piece inspired the next and it was not unusual for there to be half a dozen balsawood models carefully arranged on her workbench at the same time. These precious embryonic ideas could inhabit her studio for prolonged periods of time, sparking new resolutions for formal problems.

Inge King has been one of the most significant, visible, prolific and original artists to work in Australia during the past 60 years. Although her practice has been anchored in international developments in contemporary art, her voice has been distinctly Australian. She was an artist who refused to inhabit a closely circumscribed niche, but one who has felt the need to constantly reinvent herself in the morphology of her sculptural forms, the materials that she has employed and in the broader conceptual context with which she has engaged. In the face of all of this stylistic diversity, there has been a consistent preoccupation with ideas of movement, internal tension and with sculpture's ability to enchant and amaze the beholder. Without succumbing to the temptation of making popularist sculpture, which would cater for the lowest common denominator with mimetic copies of popular icons, Inge King made popular sculpture that created new icons with which people have been able to identify and which people could enjoy and use in their daily lives.

In her life she was celebrated with two major retrospective exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1992 and 2014 and numerous survey shows, most recently at the National Gallery in Canberra last year to commemorate her 100th birthday. The death of her husband in October 2008, a wonderful, understanding and supportive fellow artist, was a blow from which she never recovered. Although she continued to work on projects into her final years, she was deeply saddened once the creative bond of "the Kings" was broken. With her death, Australia has lost one of its most significant sculptors who created some of her finest pieces in the final few decades of her long and fruitful life.