Art review: Happy Birthday Inge King at the National Gallery of Australia

The artists Inge and Grahame King married in London in July 1950 and arrived in Melbourne the following year.

After the excitement of Europe and New York, Inge King found Melbourne, in her memorable turn of phrase, "like a can of flat beer", but she never looked back, never regretted her decision to come to Australia and set out to make the most of her life in her adopted homeland. The Kings, as they became known, held their first joint exhibition in November 1951 and now, exactly 64 years later, they have been reunited in a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. They were both born in 1915 and, while Grahame died in 2008, Inge is still going strong and this month celebrates her 100th birthday. Hence the somewhat unusual title for this exhibition Happy Birthday Inge King.

Last week at the Australian Galleries in Melbourne I attended the opening of an exhibition of the work of another German-born major sculptor, Erwin Fabian, he also turned 100, and is now working towards his next exhibition in 2017. The Tasmanian watercolourist, Max Angus, had an exhibition opening last week to mark his 101st birthday, while Loongkoonan, from the central western Kimberley region, she is still painting at 105. A century is not what it used to be.

It was in 1917 that the British monarchy instituted the practice of sending congratulatory messages to centenarians, the so-called Royal Court Telegrams. That year, seven men and 17 women were thus congratulated by King George V. There has been considerable inflation in numbers in subsequent years and by 2011, that year alone about 9736 such "tele-messages" (as they are now called), were issued by Buckingham Palace and signed by Her Majesty. I am reliably informed that there exists a secretariat of some 18 full-time employees chasing down centenarians and supercentenarians around the British Commonwealth. So to be 100 is no longer considered as being particularly old, and artists aged 100, if not a dime a dozen, are not a threatened species in Australia.

Inge King is not remarkable because she is 100, but because she is one of the most significant living sculptors in this country. Born in Berlin, where she received her earliest training, she fled Hitler's Germany leaving on the eve of Kristallnacht and took refuge in Britain. The exhibition at the National Gallery traces her work from her very early Henry Moore-inspired carvings, that she made when in London, then the expressionist pieces inspired by Zadkine, when she moved to Scotland, through to the early welded steel works that she made after her stay in New York and executed after she met her Australian artist husband and shifted to her new home in Australia. This was initially in central Melbourne and subsequently in rural Warrandyte. Throughout this exhibition, in the face of all of the stylistic diversity of work for almost 70 years, there has been a consistent preoccupation with ideas of movement, internal tension and with sculpture's ability to enchant and amaze the beholder.

Unlike most contemporary Australian sculptors, Inge King has consistently been committed to sculpture as a public art, but not sculpture as a commemorative memorial, nor sculpture as a private venue for personal gratification in the display of arcane knowledge or esoteric symbols. Without succumbing to the temptation of making popularist sculpture that would cater for the lowest common denominator with mimetic copies of popular icons, Inge King has made popular sculpture, which created new images with which people have been able to identify and that people could enjoy in their daily lives. In Canberra, we can enjoy her RAAF Memorial on Anzac Parade, the Black Sun at the ANU and the newly installed Temple Gate at the National Gallery. Her sculptures have become icons in Australia's cultural landscape.

In Inge King's development there were a number of 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 what I would term "a feminine voice". She mastered the formalist language without becoming a formulaic formalist. Her celestial imagery, which appeared in the opening years of the new century, increasingly and successfully engaged with the ideas of the spiritual in art. Although her oeuvre is characterised by a consistent high quality, I feel that she has made her best work over the past few decades of her life.

Grahame King was a painter and, perhaps more significantly, a printmaker. While completely devoted to supporting his wife's recognition as a sculptor, he forged a significant career for himself as one of Australia's foremost lithographers and became a founding member and the driving force behind the Print Council of Australia. What was central to his art was the quality of elegance plus a lyrical and evocative power beautifully resolved within a composition, where forms seem to be organically linked together. He created some of the most beautiful, abstracted, gestural works in printmaking and painting to be made anywhere in Australia.

The Kings made a huge contribution to art both in Australia and internationally, a contribution that is celebrated in this small, but exquisite exhibition.