Point Leo Estate Sculpture Park (Merricks)

The Point Leo Estate Sculpture Park has been purpose built to house an ever-evolving array of Australian and international pieces.

Similar to Sculptures By The Sea, each piece is set against the backdrop of the ocean. But ours is also set against vines, cattle and flowering native Australian gardens. There is no rhyme or reason behind the theming or selection of each piece other than this: they make us feel something special. But somehow, their size and scale fit perfectly into the open landscape.

Our Sculpture Park is alive with colour and a mix of mediums - from wood to metal to ceramic tilet. It is a visual feast, it is tactile, interactive and for everyone; families, art lovers or those who are not but would like to be.

Our Interactive App will help guide your way through the park and will connect you to each artist's hidden world and inspirations.

Our Sculpture park is open daily from 11am - 6pm with last entry at 5pm. You can choose between a short walk (30 minutes), a long walk (60 minutes) or you can combine the two.

You are invited to slow down, take your time view sculptures framed by the vines, by the sea. Walk the grounds with friends & family, or with a glass of wine or just by yourself. The experience you choose is completely up to you.

Opening Hours:

The Sculpture park is open daily from 11am - 6pm with last entry at 5pm. You can choose between a short walk (30 minutes), a long walk (60 minutes) or you can combine the two.

Cost:

$10 for adults, $5 for concession, $25 for families.

Review:

The sculpture park is part of the Point Leo Estate winery which offers wine tasting, wine sales and a restaurant as well as the sculpture park. Unusually there is a entry fee for the sculpture park, but you can't begrudge the fee when there are such large scale sculptures by world-renowned sculptors.

Sculptures in the collection

Grand Arch (2011) by Inge King (1915- 2016)



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.

Four lines up oblique V (1977) by George Rickey



Along with fellow American, Alexander Calder, George Rickey is an acclaimed master of kinetic art in which the main interest of a work is the subtle movement of finely balanced forms in response to air currents or touch.

Born in South Bend, Indiana, Rickey migrated with his family to Scotland in 1913. He later studied history at Balliol College, Oxford University. Travel to Europe followed including art tuition in Paris. Back in the United States after military service during the Second World War, Rickey studied at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts and the Chicago Institute of Design.

Starting out as a painter, Rickey turned to sculpture after seeing the large steel abstractions of David Smith and the mobiles of Calder. His subsequent focus on kinetic sculpture reflected a keen interest in engineering and mechanics.

In the 1950s, Rickey refined a style of tall, stainless steel sculptures with multiple spear-like blades that swivel-precision bearings to create graceful arcs and ever-changing configurations subject to prevailing air currents.

Portal to another time and place (2005) by Deborah Halpern



A one-time cabaret artist, Deborah Halpern grew up in a richly creative milieu. Her father Artur, a Polish emigre, and mother Sylvia, who was born in Japan but spent time in China England before coming to Australia, were prominent members of the legendary Potters Cottage founded in Warrandyte in 1958 to promote hand-made Australian ceramics.

Halpern was strongly influenced by her parents but also trained as a painter at the Caulfield Institute of Technology. In the artist's own words: 'I grew up surrounded by potters so...was always making colourful, whimsical and funky pieces of pottery'.

In the late 1980s, Halpern began to make large-scale sculpture, playfully surreal in style, decorated with mythical or imaginary motifs rendered in mosaic tiled surfaces. Her largest work, Angel (1988), a commission for the National Gallery of Victoria, was formerly installed in the Gallery's St Kilda Road moat but, was relocated in 2006 to Birrarung Marr on the bank of the Yarra River.

Tsunami (1988) by Michael Le Grand



As a student in the early 1970s at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Le Grand's aptitude for sculpture was first noticed and encouraged by Lenton Parr, then Director at the VCA. Le Grand later attended the influential St Martin's School, London, where he encountered the revolutionary teachings of the British modernist sculptor Anthony Caro.

Caro's style of assembled and welded steel sculpture, abstract in approach, open in structure, colourfully painted, dispensing with the conventional base or plinth and utilising industrial I-beams, steel plates and mesh, was a formative influence on Le Grand.

While the titles of Le Grand's works are not intended to have a narrative significance, the title of this work does evoke the same sense of swelling and turbulent motion as conveyed by the formidable wavelike elements that comprise the composition. Le Grand says of his creative process that '... I start with an idea, play with the material, run along behind it for a while, abandon some of the earlier preconceptions and expectations, and then step in to cull and tighten the image to suit my relationship with what has evolved.'

Luke (2008) by Tony Cragg



British-born but based in Wuppertal, Germany, Sir Anthony Cragg, CBE, RA is one of the world's foremost sculptors. He first came to notice in the 1970s as a minimalist and conceptual artist, best known for large-scale assemblages of found objects.

It was not until later that he began to experiment with the more traditional materials of the sculptor: wood, stone and metal. Later still he turned to materials less frequently used in sculpture such as Kevlar, rubber and plastics. More recently he has created works in glass.

Luke belongs to Cragg's Rational Beings series of works based on human heads and faces that seem to have been twisted, dilated or spun about a central axis to generate tall, columnar forms of a sensuous but elusive organic character. As the viewer walks around Luke, from one vantage point the profile of a large head emerges from a voluminously stacked and layered mass. Moving on. the facial features mutate into less explicit biomorphic and abstract shapes.

Cragg is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades. He won the Turner Prize in 1988, Praemium Imperiale in 2007, was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1992, and a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002. He was knighted in 2016 for services to visual arts and to UK-German relations. He is a member of the Royal Academy of Arts, London and of the Academy of Arts, Berlin.

Nautilus - study with three legs (2011) by Geoffrey Bartlett



Melbourne based Geoffrey Bartlett's numerous public commissions are notable for an aesthetic that combines a mechanical or architectural character with naturalistic allusion.

For example, the topmost element of this work recalls the spiral-shape of a nautilus shell, while the tall supporting tripod makes no attempt to conceal its strengthening ribs or its fastenings and footings, thus ensuring that the actual process of fabrication and assembly is expressed in the final form.

Bartlett notes that 'as an artist, we all draw from nature, (but) it would be folly...to attempt to add to its beauty or mimic its perfection. We at best can only attempt to interpret what we see.

The Nautilus shell is an iconic natural form and seems almost a metaphor for the purity of nature. I have referred to (the) Nautilus shell many times as a central theme in my (sculpt ...movement and latent energy have also remained central themes in my work.

Cosmic resonance (2011) by Augustine Dall'ava



While Dall'Ava's smaller-scale sculptures juxtapose geometric forms - mostly cubes, rectangles and cones made of laminated marble - with assorted found objects such as pebbles, larger stones and multi-forked sticks, his full-scale works like this heroic column are reduced to simple, geometrical elements of lustrous colour that are fabricated with a flawless industrial finish.

With its monumental scale and stacked and inverted cones, Cosmic resonance is reminiscent of Constantin Brancusi's Endless column variously carved in wood or constructed in metal.

While the term 'cosmic resonance' occurs in early Chinese philosophy, it is used here as a title in reference to planetary systems and cosmic forces generally. The uppermost element is like a stylized crescent moon - a familiar motif in Dall'Ava's oeuvre - pierced by an elongated cone suggestive of the colossal energies and electromagnetic resonance of the universe.

With his close associates, Geoffrey Bartlett and Anthony Pryor, Dall'Ava trained initially at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He undertook post-graduate study at Monash University. Subsequently, Dall'Ava's work has revealed a sympathy with the surrealist imagery of artists including Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy and Giorgio di Chirico.

Vega (2012) by Lenton Parr



This work is much later in date than Parr's Plant forms on display to the west of the Restaurant. While the earlier work is notable for its organic shapes, the angularity, bright red paint and horizontal format of Vega recall the gigantic forms of agricultural machinery admired by Parr on youthful visits to Melbourne's Agricultural Shows.

Parr rejected the convention that sculpture be attached to a base, ensuring that his works were designed and constructed to sit directly on the ground. This approach stresses the physical and conceptual independence of a work from conventional sculpture formats and was pioneered by Picasso and Giacometti and further developed by Parr's British contemporary Anthony Caro.

Many of Parr's works, as with Vega, are named after stars, constellations or zodiacal signs. Occasionally, these works actually resemble the disposition of shapes in the eponymous constellation. At other times, as Parr noted, he used the names simply as 'attractive words'.

Folded 1 - weightless (2003) by Andrew Rogers



Melbourne-based Andrew Rogers is recognized internationally for his series of colossal earth works collectively titled Rhythms of Life. This widely documented land art project of many years' duration comprises 51 stone configurations created in 16 countries over 7 continents.

Both Rogers' land art project as well as his cast bronze and stainless steel sculptures are the subject of several publications and documentary films.

Although bronze is a heavy metal, by means of its skillful casting and patination, the sculptures in Rogers' Weightless series evoke a sense of lightness, fluidity and even weightlessness.

The artist conceives these works as metaphors, as he says, for the central questions of organic life: growth, propagation, evolution, emotion and rhythm.

Drummer (1986) by Barry Flanagan (1941 - 2009)



The Welsh-born sculptor Barry Flanagan OBE RA is widely known for his series of monumental bronze hares and other animals depicted in dynamic or performative attitudes. The hares in particular are vested with human attributes or emotions such as jubilation (as seen here), introspection, dejection, playfulness and combativeness.

Festive, even heroic in spirit, the colossal and somewhat cartoonish hare of Drummer skips or marches along on its hind legs - as if leading a procession - an Irish frame drum held above its head, a drumstick in the other hand poised to strike the instrument with gusto. Notably, Flanagan's modelling recalls the rippling, expressive surfaces of works by the French sculptor, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), an important influence on Flanagan's art.

In the late 1970s, in a surprising reversal of his earlier embrace of abstraction and unorthodox materials, Flanagan turned instead to figuration and the traditional methods of modelling in clay and casting in bronze.

It was then that the subject of the hare emerged as a recurrent motif in his sculpture; an image inspired by his observing the 'mysterious, acrobatic, and unpredictable' movements of a hare as it darted across a Sussex field. The artist's fascination with the subject deepened after reading The Leaping Hare (1972) by Welsh author and folklorist George Ewart Evans who discussed the extensive mythology of the animal.

Laura (2013) by Jaume Plensa



Jaume Plensa is best known for large-scale figurative works installed prominently in major cities around the world. Several of these are colossal heads cast in iron while others are cast in polyester resin mixed with marble dust.

Further works are fabricated in stainless steel as cage-like frameworks comprising letters or texts that allude to the theme of globalization. Plensa works both in conventional sculptural media as well as with water, light, sound and video.

With its softly modelled features, Laura is typical of the artist's series of monumental female heads with their eyes closed in reverie or meditation. Viewed from the front, the heads are exaggeratedly narrow like certain portraits by Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti; while the peaceful expression recalls Rumanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi's 'sleeping muses' in bronze and marble. However, when viewed from the side, Laura appears fully modelled and naturalistic. This interplay of perceptions is a feature of Plensa's work generally.

Sky is the limit (2014) by Tomakazu Matsuyama



Originally created for temporary installation at the entrance to Hong Kong's popular Harbour City shopping complex, this work involves a fusion of eastern and western sources and narratives.

Fabricated in China, Sky is the limit is a hybrid of national, art historical and popular cultural references. As a grand equestrian portrait, the work is based on French artist Jacques-Louis David's painting Napoleon crossing the Alps (1801).

At the same time, the complex tracery of curvilinear steel members recalls the vitality and graphic qualities of Hokusai Manga, a famous series of wood-block printed 'sketches' by 19th century Japanese artist Hokusai.

Born in rural Japan, Matsuyama was introduced early to Japanese arts and crafts traditions when, aged nine, he moved with his family to California where he was soon accustomed to 'West Coast' values. Tertiary education in Japan and America in business studies, communications and design led to employment with Levi Strauss and Nike.

Matsuyama's mature style as painter and sculptor is a synthesis of contrasting influences including Japanese Ukiyo-e prints and the works of Jackson Pollock, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Riff (1996) by Clement Meadmore (1929 - 2005)



Born in Melbourne, Meadmore trained as an engineer and industrial designer. He worked as a furniture designer before making his first welded metal sculptures in the early 1950s. Traveling widely over the next decade, he moved permanently to the United States in 1963. At the time of his death in New York, Meadmore's international reputation was foremost among Australian sculptors of his generation.

Meadmore's monumental sculpture combines aspects of the prevailing post-war styles of abstract, expressionism and minimalism. In spite of their imposing mass and industrial character, their appearance suggests a spontaneity of gesture, weightlessness and rhythmic motion.

As an amateur musician, Meadmore's fondness for jazz underlies the title of this work as does his own statement that '...a sculpture is a presence inhabiting the environment.'

Watching and waiting (2010) by Jon Eiseman



Invariably cast in bronze, Jon Eiseman's sculptures are surrealist in mood and depict either a solitary figure in 'a suit - the 'common man' - or small groups of figures in attitudes of existential contemplation or palpable anguish.

Inhabiting dreamlike settings, Eiseman's bald-headed figures are accompanied by large birds, leafless trees or assorted fantasy creatures. Some appear cast adrift on a vast sea in a tiny boat. Others carry the boat on their backs.

Several grasp a pilgrim's staff as does the figure in this work, gazing into the distance, watching and waiting for a sign or revelation. Eiseman's symbolism is otherworldly and unsettling. The human condition and the evocation of a timeless quest are his central concerns.

While art had always been present in Eiseman's early years, it was not his primary focus until he went to live temporarily in New Zealand where his experience of Maori sculpture proved to be a watershed moment in his career.

Lady with flowers (2017) by Dean Bowen



Dean Bowen grew up in the regional Victorian town of Maryborough. He studied printmaking at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology but attributes an abiding interest in nature, animals and birds as recurrent subjects in his work to his rural upbringing.

This also explains, in part, the artist's embrace of the innocence and whimsicality of 'outsider art' or 'Art Brut' - a term coined by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe seemingly naive imagery created mostly by self-taught artists working outside artistic conventions.

Dubuffet's own repertoire of craggy, flattened-out and intensely gazing figures influenced Bowen's work in all media.

Although Lady with flowers is modelled in the round it has the dominant frontal projection and humorous appeal typical of Bowen's sculpture that features the same quirky and playful subjects found in his paintings and prints.

Dreams of ordinary people (2010) by Peter Tilley



Born in Melbourne, Peter Tilley trained at the Newcastle School of Art and Design in NSW and later at the University of Newcastle: Having practised both as a ceramicist and a sculptor, his work in the latter discipline is characterised by variations on the theme of a mysterious stage-like tableau involving a solitary and featureless human figure.

The artist has implied that while the psychological disquiet aroused by these compositions reflects aspects of his personal experience, his intention is to evoke ideas and narratives that are universal in nature and open to wider interpretation.

Here, Tilley's anonymous protagonist is poised at a doorway, seemingly hesitant to proceed beyond its threshold into an adjoining realm (the future?) where another of Tilley's signature motifs, the archetype of a small oarless boat - or rather, as here, a boat-shaped concavity - awaits. The stillness of the spectacle, and the ambiguity as to whether we are witness to a moment of trepidation or positive expectation typify the emotional contradictions in Tilley's work.

Big boy (2016) by Zadok Ben-David



London-based Zadok Ben-David was born in Yemen. As a child, he migrated with his family to Israel where, in the early 1970s, he trained at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Living in the UK from 1974, he studied at the University of Reading and later at St Martin's School of Art, London.

Ben-David creates installations and sculpture and he represented Israel at the Venice Biennale in 1988. In 2008, he was commissioned to make a sculpture for the Beijing Olympics.

Big boy relates to an installation titled People I saw but I never met - a tableaux of 3,000 miniature metal figures; in effect a 'snapshot of humanity. The plasma-cut metal figures are based on drawings the artist makes from his own photographs of individuals in everyday situations.

Big boy originates in Ben-David's photograph of a boy with a soccer ball glimpsed in a street in Portugal. The soaring profile is hand-cut from a single sheet of corten steel, but in such a way that this two-dimensional image creates the illusion of a third dimension.

To the centre (2000) by Greg Johns



A member of the New York Sculptors Guild and the International Sculpture Centre, Greg Johns is based on a rural property at Palmer in South Australia's Adelaide Hills where he has established a 'sculpture landscape' along with a program to re-generate the surrounding native vegetation. Johns refers to the Australian landscape as an abiding inspiration for the emblematic character of his work.

Fabricated in corten steel, a viewer comprehends this large mandala-like form quite differently from changing vantage points. This mercurial aspect of Johns' work is experienced by walking around To the centre. At one location, the work presents as a portal framing a distant vista. From another location, the girth is reduced to a slender, serpentine form.

Greg Johns also finds inspiration in ancient belief systems as well as contemporary developments in physics and philosophy. His mastery of material and method is such that heavy metal is cajoled into rhythmical and supple configurations reminiscent of a Celtic knot.

Horizons (2011) by Anthony Pryor



Melbourne-based Anthony Pryor studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology where he later lectured in the sculpture department. Having completed a number of prominent public commissions - including The Legend (1991) outside the Melbourne Cricket Ground - Pryor's artistic career was cut short by his untimely death in 1991.

For some years, Pryor shared studios with his close associates Geoffrey Bartlett and Augustine Dall'Ava. Although all three artists revealed a predilection, on occasion, for juxtaposing different materials in meticulously assembled and open-structured forms, their work took entirely different directions with Pryor's early box-like constructions in wood featuring traditional Japanese joinery techniques. Pryor's larger lyrical abstractions are mostly fabricated in metal.

Horizons, as the title suggests, is intended to be seen against the sky and natural horizon. Its stylized stair element - a recurring motif in Pryor's work - rises to an animated configuration with cloud, rainbow and landscape symbols. The composition as a whole has a sense of forward motion while its sweeping curvilinear elements lead the eye into space.

Reflected Moon (2009) by Peter Blizzard



After completing formal studies at Prahran College of Advanced Education and later at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Blizzard worked initially as an engineering draftsman and graphic designer until 1970 when he began to concentrate full-time on sculpture, both as a practitioner and lecturer.

Based for many years in regional Victoria, Blizzard often cited a deep attachment to his local environment- native bushland - as a prevailing influence on his work. He recognised a comparable reverence for the natural world in Japanese art and culture; additional and important sources that inform his later work in particular.

The significance of the moon in Japanese culture - together with its symbolism representing a wish for a long life - are evoked in this sculpture with its gold-coloured motif, overall lightness of touch and its echoing circular and semi-circular elements suggestive of a rainbow or the moon itself.

In 2006, Blizzard was accorded the rare honour of a one-person exhibition at the Hakone Sculpture Park in Japan.

Semi-circular mirror labyrinth (2015) by Jeppe Hein



Acclaimed for his precise, geometric structures with highly reflective surfaces - in this case, polished stainless steel struts - Danish sculptor Jeppe Hein's installations recall aspects of the Op art and Minimalist movements of the 1960s. However, unlike the pared-down shapes and formal objectivity of those idioms, Hein's works are playful, seductive and dynamic.

Reminiscent of the colonnade of a classical temple, Hein's four arcs composed of equidistant mirrored elements are optically activated by the viewer's approach. Walking around the work, we are captivated by an ever-shifting visual spectacle of reflections, of light and elusive shadow, glimpses of ourselves, of other viewers and of the sky and surrounding landscape.

Hein was born in 1974 and educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and later at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt. He lives and works in Berlin.

Midnight special (2009) by Robert Bridgewater



Having studied Fine Art at Monash University in Melbourne, Bridgewater continued his training at the Victorian College of the Arts where he graduated in 1995. His work is often inspired by details observed in the art and architecture of countries visited during his travels in Europe, Asia and Northern Africa.

This work, for example - a bronze cast of a prototype carved in cypress wood - appears to represent a kind of tepee-like shelter and yet its form is derived from the famous rays of divine light, rendered in gilt bronze, that descend from heaven in Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa - the great masterpiece of Roman Baroque sculpture.

Whereas the title comes from an American folk song about a passenger train in Texas known as the 'Midnight Special'. Its headlight shone through the windows of a prison as it passed by, purportedly stimulating thoughts of travel and freedom, and perhaps, salvation for the prisoners. Accordingly, the artist intends this work to provoke thoughts on the nature of hope.

Weightless 9 (2009) by Andrew Rogers



Educated at Monash University, Andrew Rogers lives in Melbourne but works internationally. His high profile series of colossal earthworks - collectively titled Rhythms of Life - have been created in many remote locations around the world. They have been the subject of numerous publications and televised documentaries.

Rogers is also known for his prominent public commissions and for his free-standing sculpture that often, as here, appears to subvert the very mass of its heavy metal by assuming forms suggestive of textiles that lightly flutter and billow in space; suggestive that is of sense of weightlessness.

Languorous repose (2013) by Albert Paley



Conceived initially by Paley for a temporary installation of thirteen large-scale sculptures along the median strip of New York City's Park Avenue, Languorous repose illustrates the artist's constructivist aesthetic of complex, abstract structures that do not actually move but imply a sense of motion and animation through gesture and balance.

Paley's creative process begins with numerous drawings and cut-out paper and cardboard models. The individual elements of these models are then scanned by computer to guide the making of a torch-cut steel model. This last model is the basis for fabricating the final, full-scale work.

In reference to Paley's Park Avenue sculptures, an interviewer once observed that 'like the artist himself, these constructions have big personality and presence, yet they somehow remain nimble and accessible.' While wholly abstract in nature, this work and others in the same series, could be said to involve 'empathetic' or emotionally evocative
forms whose fluid and often unexpected gestures recall those of bodies in motion.

Paley's work is represented in many major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and London's Victoria and Albert Museum. He has been responsible for some 50 site-specific commissions.

RK368 (1981), RK366 (1982), RK659 (1987), RK753 (1989), RK656 (1989) by Robert Klippel



One of Australia's most acclaimed sculptors, Robert Klippel's early training was at the Sydney Technical College under the modernist sculptor Lyndon Dadswell. Even then, in the mid-1940s, Klippel was committed to abstraction as a necessary release, as he saw it, from the long-established tradition of figuration.

Later, he studied in London and spent time in Paris where he exhibited with Picasso, returning to Australia in 1950. By 1954 he was established as a graphic designer but decided to move to the United States in 1957 where he remained, immersed in the vibrant contemporary art scene there until his permanent return to Australia in 1963. After then he was based in Birchgrove, Sydney.

While in New York, Klippel had begun to experiment with machine parts and other found materials which he reassembled into finely-balanced abstract forms. In spite of his choice of artificial materials and focus on abstract form, his declared aim was to 'express the workings of nature in its broadest sense'.

This group of five bronzes from the 1980s, represents the artist's mature style of constructivism. Initially assembled from a vast array of old wooden patterns - used for casting machine parts -salvaged from a foundry, these forms were then cast in bronze, a process that further unified, in the artist's eyes, the disparate elements of the wooden 'prototype' assemblage.

A close friend of the sculptor, the painter and writer James Gleeson, once described these works by Klippel as 'sonnets of form'.

Private poetry (2010) by Richard Tipping



Richard Tipping is recognised internationally for his ironic adaptations of official signage templates to create poetic or absurd shifts in meaning. The process is exemplified by his well-known alteration of the ubiquitous No Standing street sign to read, in his own deadpan version No Understanding.

Tipping studied film, philosophy and literature at Flinders University in Adelaide, later exploring the typographic idiom of concrete or visual poetry in which the shapes of blocks of words or letters created on a page take precedence over any meaning in the sentences.

In the 1970s, Tipping began to photograph and document the frequent ironies and anomalies he detected in public signage, eventually publishing Signs of Australia in 1982.

Sometimes known as a word sculptor and visual poet he often combines road sign language and Australian vernacular speech. Light hearted and lyrical in tone, this work deflates the more usual stern warning not to enter a private domain.

Sunrise east march (2007) by Ugo Rondinone



Born in Brunnen, Switzerland to Italian parents, Ugo Rondinone moved to Zurich in 1983 to become assistant to the controversial Austrian multi-media artist Hermann Nitsch. Then came a period of study at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna prior to Rondinone's move to the USA in 1998.

Based now in New York City, he is acclaimed internationally for an experimental practice that includes multi-media installations, spray-painted target paintings, video environments and sound works. Rondinone represented Switzerland at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

In 2013, he completed a major public a project Human Nature for the Rockefeller Centre Plaza in New York. Comprising a group of gigantic stone sentinels, the installation invited comparison with Stonehenge. Whereas, Rondinone's Moonrise and Sunrise sculptures - colossal potato-faced heads with toothy grins that are variously menacing, mischievous and comical - recall the legendary moai on Easter Island.

Sunrise east march can be interpreted as a reference to the often controversial
appropriation by modern artists including Picasso and Braque of the expressive, rough-hewn carvings of so-called 'primitive art.

In the USA, Rondinone's public works frequently cause a sensation as did Seven Magic Mountains, an installation of seven large and luridly painted stone totems along the interstate freeway linking Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Similar to this work, three Moonrise heads recently installed outside a high-rise development on San Francisco's Mission Street were described in the local media as 'goofy cousins to Eduard Munch's The Scream'.

Mirri (2018) by Reko Rennie



Mirri (meaning 'Star') exemplifies Reko Rennie's continuing exploration of Aboriginal identity within a multi-disciplinary practice. As well as sculpture, Rennie also works in other traditional and new media.

The diamond or geometricized shield shape at the heart of Mirri's composition is closely associated with the artist's Kamilaroi heritage. The Kamilaroi or Gamilaraay are an indigenous people whose traditional lands extend from southern Queensland into New South Wales.

Superimposed on the shield motif are two abstracted boomerang forms whose opposing orientation recalls the pictorial formality of the Western tradition of heraldry.

Mirri's fluorescent palette and pattern of broad chevrons - both are hallmarks of Rennie's work - were created using vinyl stencils and automotive paints. They echo Rennie's urban upbringing and formative years as a youthful creator of provocative and gaudy graffiti and street art.

What's more, the bright palette and crisp pattern attest to the influence on Rennie of the work of Australian painter Howard Arkley (1951-1999), known for his technique of spray painting large, smooth-surfaced compositions using bold, black outlines to depict Australian urban and suburban subjects.

American street culture of the 1980s is similarly acknowledged by Rennie as a source of inspiration along with the art of Andy Warhol and pop art in general.

Ancient range floating (2003) by Peter Blizzard



After completing formal studies at Prahran College of Advanced Education and later at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Blizzard worked initially as an engineering draftsman and graphic designer until 1970 when he was able to focus full-time on sculpture.

Based for many years in regional Victoria, Blizzard often cited a deep attachment to his local environment - native bushland - as a prevailing influence on his work. Japanese art and culture were also prime influences on his sculpture and personal outlook.

This latter influence is seen in Ancient range floating, an austere structure like a kind of shrine reflecting Blizzard's familiar tiered composition - here vaguely architectural in character and supported on massive foundation stones. A single, smoothly finished round stone is enclosed within a rectangular casement above a curvilinear section suggestive of a rolling landscape. The title refers to the upper section of rocks sourced from an ancient mountain range. It also refers to the jagged 'horizon line' formed by this same row of stacked stones.

Paradiso (1999) by Ron Robertson-Swann



Sydney-based painter and sculptor, Ron Robertson-Swann, is one of Australia's foremost exponents of the modernist tradition of assembled and welded metal sculpture pioneered in the 1960s by British sculptor Anthony Caro.

Having trained in the late 1950s at the National Art School in Sydney, Robertson-Swann travelled to London to study at the progressive St Martin's School of Art where Caro was a highly influential teacher.

Back in Australia in 1968, Robertson-Swann adopted Caro's method of welding industrial plate, tubes, mesh, I-beams and found objects to create angular works that are open in structure, brightly painted and true to Caro's quest to 'remove sculpture from its pedestal'. Robertson-Swann states that his aim is 'to develop (his) sculpture towards the condition of music' and compares his method to 'drawing in space'.

Commissioned in 1978 for Melbourne's new city square, Robertson-Swann's most controversial work, Vault, was relocated soon afterwards in the wake of a rancorous public debate about its suitability for the location.

Laban's seal III (1983) by Les Kossatz



As a printmaker and sculptor, Les Kossatz was best known for allegorical imagery featuring sheep motifs - the experience of once having nursed an injured sheep being the catalyst for this preoccupation.

Born in Melbourne, Kossatz studied sculpture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. During the 1970s he began making his sheep sculptures using casts from actual carcasses and often the fleece itself.

For Kossatz, the sheep motif served different purposes: to signify the spirit of the Australian landscape or else to conjure up a more contested history, namely the pastoral 'conquest' of the land. An interest in world religions also comes into play when his work alludes to biblical stories.

Laban's seal refers to the Old Testament account of Laban 'the Aramean', his family and flocks and rather complicated dealings with his nephew Jacob. Eventually. Laban and Jacob make peace with one another, marking their covenant with a seal.

Rise 1 (2010) by Andrew Rogers



Known also for his colossal land art projects or geoglyphs created in spectacular and remote regions over seven continents, Rogers has been awarded numerous public commissions for large-scale and essentially constructivist works in bronze and stainless steel. Rise 1 exemplifies this aspect of his practice.

Open in structure, with polished surfaces and a muscular framework, Rise 1 appears to surge upwards from a narrow base to a voluminous superstructure of bars and struts that cast intricate shadows at certain times of the day. In contrast to the muted demeanour of Rogers cast bronze sculpture seen elsewhere in this park, the viewer has the impression here of a towering and dynamic form that is either folding in on itself or expanding according to the viewer's vantage point.

Three madrigals (2011) by David Horton



Since completing graduate and post-graduate studies at the National Art School, Sydney in 2008, Horton has worked primarily in the modernist idiom of assembled and welded steel as championed in the 1960s by David Smith in the USA and Anthony Caro in Britain.

Horton states that he assigns titles to his works after their completion, but he has also implied that his intention with this work was to interpret musical experience in sculptural form - the madrigal being a secular song for several voices that was pop Renaissance and Baroque periods.

Art historical reference is also found in Horton's work and perhaps most explicitly in a later sculpture whose assembled and welded components, while robustly abstract in kind, are based on figurative and architectural details in a painting by the 15th-century Italian master Andrea del Verrocchio.

With these three forms, the folding and juxtaposing of elements alludes to the rhythms and characteristics of a madrigal.

Impulse (2011) by Adrian Mauriks



Dutch-born Adrian Mauriks arrived in Australia in 1957. He studied at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne and subsequently spent some years as a university lecturer in sculpture.

While his earlier black-painted metal sculpture could be bleak in mood, the impression created by his later works - carved in polyurethane foam, coated in resin and painted a gleaming white - is one of optimism and vivacity.

His sleek organic forms resemble stylised birds, plants and clouds. This particular work arises from the artist's interest in Greek mythology and the notion of the hero's journey that entails a call to adventure, the crossing of metaphorical thresholds and eventual transformation before a homecoming and renewal.

The work is intended to be a metaphor for life. The bird represents the call, the vessel represents the journey, the cluster (the central form) a threshold and the bud (on land) represents rebirth that results from the journey. The forms float and move relative to one another; a continually shifting arrangement indicating the inevitability of change in our lives.

West orbis (2009) by Robert Hague



New Zealand-born Robert Hague is a Melbourne based sculptor and printmaker whose work ranges from lyrical abstraction, as here, to highly realistic imagery including human forms as well as inanimate objects such as hand tools. As a sculptor, Hague works in stainless steel, bronze and marble.

In his Orbis series of sculptures, he creates dynamic and sinuous compositions that call to mind, notionally at least, the swirling skirts of Loie Fuller, the famous 'serpentine dancer' who performed in the 1890s at the Folies Bergere in Paris.

It has also been said that the curvilinear compositions of the Orbis sculptures allude to the distinctive patterns of traditional Maori carvings known to Hague from his youth in New Zealand's Rotorua.

Another interpretation of the imagery suggests that the gestural sweep of this and related sculptures conjures up the trajectory, or orbit, of a celestial object.

Parabola (2008) by Philip Spelman



Canberra-based Philip Spelman trained at the Queensland College of the Arts before going on to major in sculpture at the Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, graduating there in 1987. Spelman works mostly in welded steel or cast and fabricated bronze.

Invariably, his steel sculpture is painted in bright primary colours, a feature he declares 'is essential to draw viewers' eyes to my works across long distances - whether in the city or in the landscape'

At the Canberra School of Art, Spelman was taught by noted constructivist sculptor, Ron Robertson-Swann, whose advocacy of the welded-metal idiom and focus on purely abstract form was a key influence on Spelman's development as a formalist sculptor.

Nonetheless, Spelman's sculpture is never entirely devoid of reference to the external world and is rarely without lyrical, even playful passages such as occurs here with the stylized chair and bottle-shaped elements that support opposing ends of a wobbly swag - not exactly a parabola - of loosely connected petal like shapes.

Plant forms (1959-60) by Lenton Parr



After service in the Second World War with the Royal Australian Air Force, Parr studied at the Royal Melbourne Technical College. From 1955 to 1957 he worked in Britain as assistant to the great modernist sculptor Henry Moore.

However, it was the example of younger British sculptors including Reg Butler and Lyn Chadwick that influenced the future direction of Parr's work. Unlike Moore, these artists worked in welded steel. Their spiky, rough-textured compositions were likened to a 'geometry of fear' expressive of post-War angst.

Back in Australia in 1957, Parr and several other progressive Melbourne-based sculptors formed the Centre Five Group to advocate for public commissions for local sculptors. As such, Parr's somewhat primeval Plant forms, in welded steel, was originally installed at the Chadstone Shopping Centre.

Corona (1996) by Akio Makigawa



Born in Karatsu, Japan in 1948, Akio Makigawa came to Australia in 1974 with the intention of training as a sail-maker in Perth. A keen yachtsman, his idea was to sail around the world. painting en route; although he soon abandoned this plan after meeting his partner-to-be. Cartier, in drawing classes in Perth.

While Makigawa had no formal art training in his native Japan, he studied sculpture at the Western Australian Institute of Technology in the late 1970s before moving to Melbourne in 1981 where he completed further study at the Victorian College of the Arts. Working with precision and sensitivity in various media - paper, sailcloth, papier-mache, marble, Gorton steel and stainless steel - Makigawa enjoyed a highly productive career in terms of studio practice, regular exhibitions and public commissions until his untimely death in 1999.

Although not a practising Buddhist, Makigawa's life and work were informed by an unmistakably Japanese aesthetic and a sense of Zen-like repose. His familiar repertoire of smoothly-finished, finely-balanced and subtly-inflected forms includes faceted pods, obelisks and truncated cones. Whether he was working in bronze or marble or, as later in his career, with the inscrutable sheen of stainless steel, Makigawa was always respectful of what he termed the 'spiritual side of (his) material'.

As one of Makigawa's major works, Corona is a fusion of natural form (a stylized bud on a tall stem) with an asymmetrical structure that itself combines architectural solidity with a sensuousness of surface and contour.

Eagle (2002) by Bruce Armstrong



Melbourne-based Bruce Armstrong is a painter, sculptor and printmaker. He trained at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, graduating in 1981.

Armstrong's best-known public commission is a colossal 23-metre high version of Eagle - a recurrent theme for the artist - located in Wurundjeri Way, a thoroughfare in Melbourne's Docklands precinct.

Inspired by the monumental animal sculpture of ancient Middle Eastern and other cultures, Armstrong works primarily in wood, carving massive blocks of red gum or cypress using a chainsaw for much of the process. His manner is expressionist and often his sculpture is painted as were wood and stone carvings in antiquity.

Armstrong's eagle imagery references Australian Aboriginal mythology and specifically the spirit creator Bunjil who is depicted as a wedge-tailed eagle. Speaking generally, the artist describes his mythic birds, bears and other creatures 'as metaphors for different states of mind'.

Running writing (2004) by Michael Snape



A Sydney-based sculptor, painter and poet, Michael Snape is best known for his lyrical screen-like sculptures in stainless steel. As with this sprightly laser-cut frieze, Snape's silhouettes are often based on drawings of stylised human figures in motion.

To some extent, these sequential motifs are reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering stop-motion photographs from the 1880s of naked figures running, leaping or wrestling for the camera.

His public commissions in various Australian cities include a large-scale metal assemblage at Sydney's Walsh Bay. Whether figurative or purely abstract in character, Snape's sculpture is notable for its sense of calligraphic flow and rhythm - an attribute that can be seen in relation to his mother Margo Snape's work as a calligrapher.

Night Imp (2010) by Matt Calvert



Based in Glaziers Bay in southern Tasmania, sculptor Matt Calvert trained initially at the University of Tasmania before a Samstag Scholarship took him overseas for further study at London's renowned Goldsmiths College where he graduated in 1994. Since then he has undertaken artist residencies in France, Malaysia and Japan and completed a number of large-scale public commissions.

Night Imp is typical of Calvert's monumental silhouettes that resemble story-book depictions of owls, children, animals or, as here, a hollow-eyed version of a mischievous hobgoblin of the sort that features in a popular video game.

Also characteristic of Calvert's sculpture is his unusual method of construction: a cold-fusion lamination process using recycled fragments of toughened glass. The flat surface of the fused and laminated form is then polished to enhance its partial translucency. The overall shape is accentuated by an aluminium edge.

Hazlel and Ma'aseyahu (2011) by Boaz Vaadia

lsraeli-born artist Boaz Vaadia is best known for figurative sculptures constructed from stacked slates and stones. The artist salvaged these material as urban detritus in the vicinity of his studio in New York where he relocated in 1975 on a grant from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation.

Whether as individual figures or figure groups. Vaadia's stone and slate sculptures have a timeless quality arising in part from the artist's choice of materials but also from the sense of repose and spiritual calm conveyed by his seated or respectfully kneeling personages.

Vaadia himself remarked 'I work with rapture as an equal partner - the strongest thing I address is that primal connection of man to earth.'

Fantasia (1999) by Inge King



Inge King was born in Berlin and trained at the Berlin Academy in the late-1930s and later, in the mid-1940s, at the Royal Academy in London and the Glasgow School of Art. During these years she met and married Australian painter and printmaker Grahame King. The couple moved to Australia in 1950.

Inge King is one of Australia's most acclaimed sculptors and 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 Melbourne-based Centre Five group of sculptors who sought ''to foster greater public awareness of contemporary sculpture in Australia'.

While King is best known for her austere, black-painted abstract sculpture, in the 1980s she began to experiment with a more lyrical and highly stylised idiom involving arrangements of fiat planes somewhat reminiscent of a Matisse cutout. These works often appear to be dancing figures or birds taking flight and were cast in bronze. Fantasia exemplifies this aspect of King's career.

Conversation (2007) by Bert Flugelman



Born in Vienna in 1923, Herbert (Bert) Flugelman came to Australia in 1938 with his family who were refugees from Nazism. After the War, Flugelman trained at the National Art School, Sydney before travelling to Europe where he held several exhibitions. He returned to Australia in 1955. In later years he held lecturing positions in South Australia and New South Wales until his retirement from teaching in 1990.

A turning point in his career came in 1967 when he won the Mildura Sculpture Prize, he was awarded a number of major public commissions - notably for works in central Sydney, at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and in Adelaide's Rundle Mall. Flugelman is best known irk large-scale geometric abstractions fabricated in polished stainless steel.

Conversation exemplifies the artist's mature style with its multiple triangulated forms whose gleaming surfaces reflect and visually dissolve the work's immediate surroundings in a dynamic play of light and shade.

Indoors

Seated figure (Forbidden fruit) 2000 by Gunther Kopietz



Mask (1980) by Joel Elenberg

Access for Dogs:

On-duty Guide Dogs/certified service animals are welcome, but unfortunately, we cannot allow pets on the Estate. The Sculpture Park is not pet-friendly.

Location

3649 Frankston-Flinders Road,  Merricks 3916 Map

✆ (03) 5989 9011



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Point Leo Estate Sculpture Park (Merricks)3649 Frankston-Flinders Road,, Merricks, Victoria, 3916