Grand Arch
Inge KING
Germany/Australia 1915–2016 arrived Australia 1951
Grand Arch 2011
Painted Steel
Inge King is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and prolific sculptors whose significant public commissions include the Royal Australian Air Force Memorial (1973) in Canberra, Forward surge (1974–1982) outside the Melbourne Arts Centre and Sentinel (2000) on the Eastern Freeway in Melbourne.
Throughout her long and successful career King was a staunch advocate for modernist principles in art including the integration of sculpture with architecture and urban planning. In the 1960s she was a member of the progressive Melbourne-based Centre Five group of sculptors who sought ‘to foster greater public awareness of contemporary sculpture in Australia’.
Personally, King developed an exacting, austere and formidable style of constructivist abstraction. Much of her work is fabricated in steel or aluminium and painted black with occasional primary-coloured accents.
Inge King was born in Berlin and trained at the Berlin Academy in the late-1930s and later at the Royal Academy in London in 1940 and the Glasgow School of Art from 1941 to 1943. During these war years she found teaching work and met and married Australian painter and printmaker Grahame King. The couple moved to Australia in 1950, establishing a home in Warrandyte, then a semi-rural area outside Melbourne.
Grand arch was specially commissioned for Pt Leo Estate Sculpture Park from a maquette created in 1993. The sculpture serves as a symbolic entry portal to the park.