Planet

Among the most fastidious of the post-war generation of abstractionists, Inge King has spent a lifetime pursuing the ideal of formal perfection in three-dimensional practice. Planet is a sculptural statement of unerring purity, a seamless confluence of volume, void and surface. Though not without a suggestion of anthropomorphism in the centralised metallic head, it withholds feeling, refuses inquisition and stands as a starkly self-sufficient icon of the artist's aesthetic resolve. Half ritual object, half cosmic artefact, Planet is imbued most of all with a sense of its own durability. King, who was born in Germany, studied in Berlin, London and Glasgow before relocating to Australia in 1951. Initially working as a jeweller, she graduated to welded sculpture in black steel. Much of her output has been in the realm of large-scale public statuary. In recent years she has executed a number of quirkily figurative sculptures, though not at the cost of her always operative abstract values.

Art Gallery Handbook, 1999