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A modernist artwork in mirror finish stainless steel reflects the world around it in memory of William Dobell.
Artist: Herbert Flugelman
Artwork description
This modernist artwork is 6 highly polished, mirror finish stainless steel cubes, stood on end and stacked atop each other. The sculpture stands almost 20m high on a pyramid base, which is set on a square stone plinth on the corner of Spring and Pitt streets.
The Dobell Memorial Sculpture commemorates one of Australia’s most celebrated landscape and portrait artists. Australian painter William Dobell was born in Newcastle, NSW on 24 September 1899. He became an architect in 1916 and later moved to Sydney to study at the Julian Ashton Art School.
In 1943 Dobell won the Archibald Prize with Portrait of an Artist. He was again awarded the Archibald Prize in 1948 for a portrait of Margaret Olley the same year he was awarded the Wynne Prize for Storm Approaching Wangi. He won the Archibald a third time in 1959 for a portrait of Dr EG MacMahon.
Dobell was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1965 and was knighted in 1966. He died on 13 May 1970 at Wangi Wangi near Newcastle.
Artist
Herbert ‘Bert’ Flugelman was born in 1923 in Vienna, Austria and arrived in Australia in 1938. From 1948 to 1951 he studied at the National Art School in Sydney and later taught at the South Australian School of Art and the University of Wollongong.
Flugelman is best known for his geometric and monumental stainless steel sculptural work. It was concerned with ‘Platonic Solids’ and featured cones, spheres and pyramids arranged in coherent lines. Flugelman died on 26 February 2013.
