Meander II

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Arriving in London in 1964, Carl Sydow later recalled that he was left ‘in a great state of confusion’1 by the work of Anthony Caro. Called ‘the Moses of English sculpture’2 by influential American critic Clement Greenberg, Caro had lately abandoned the pedestal and taken to working with industrial materials and strong, simple colours. In New Zealand, sculpture seemed to have only recently come to grips with the influence of Henry Moore.

In London Sydow met up with two fellow New Zealanders, sculptors John Panting and Stephen Furlonger, both of whom were enrolled at the Royal College of Art. Sydow was ‘astounded and impressed by a lot of the work being done there’.3 Although he did not enrol at the college, he did take advantage of the studios. There, he was able to familiarise himself with the principles of the new sculpture, a constructive art that emphasised space, surface and volume rather than traditional sculptural values of weight, solidity and mass. Returning to New Zealand in 1966, Sydow slowly digested these new ideas, and by the end of the decade he had abandoned modelling and casting and was working instead with commercially available materials from which his sculptures could be constructed and assembled.

Meander II, its vertically oriented companion Meander I (Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū) and a third work in the series were first shown at Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington, in 1971. Meander II is a kind of drawing in space, a reductive exercise in the arrangement of colour and line. The vibrantly coloured lengths of hose that curl, loop and distend across the gallery floor are enhanced by the addition of a mirror, which acts as both a physical support for the hoses and a visual device that duplicates and distorts their patterns. Works such as Meander II, and the more industrial Construction II, 1973 (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa), show that by the time of his premature death in 1975 Sydow had found his own language, one that was light and playful, physical and tangible.

Aaron Kreisler