Cotter

With one sweeping gesture, Cotter embodies Melbourne-born Clement Meadmore’s defining interest in the tensions between balance, gravity and expressiveness. A singular rectangular volume, constructed from robust cor-ten steel, seems to defy physics and effortlessly curves in and extends out into open space. A sense of weightlessness and movement is achieved through the play of light and shadow over the form’s crisp edges and smooth planes and in the changing proportions of line when viewed from multiple perspectives, with Meadmore himself remarking, ‘you can enter wherever you want’.

Cotter was created during Meadmore’s fertile early New York period, following his relocation from Australia in 1963. In America, his 1940s study of aeronautical engineering, along with his industrial and furniture design in Melbourne, informed his combination of gestural expressionism, and its seeming opposite, minimalism. In addition to making small-scale sculpture of immense power and energy, as in Cotter, the artist created numerous large-scale sculptures for public spaces across America and is known today as one of Australia’s most significant modernist sculptors.

Elle Freak, Associate Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture