Leopoldine Mimovich

Leopoldine Mimovich (née Deflorian) OAM, also known as "Poldi" (June 25, 1920 – December 25, 2019), was an Austro-Australian liturgical artist, sculptor, etcher, brazier, carver, painter, illustrator and printmaker.

In 1985, she received a Medal of the Order of Australia for her 'service to sculpture'.

Early life and education Mimovich was born in 1920, the second of five children in a devoutly Catholic family, and spent her childhood in Sankt Johann in the Pongau region of the First Republic of Austria (currently Neumarkt, Italy). Her parents recognised her artistic potential early, but could not afford to send her to art school, so she worked throughout her teens as an apprentice to her father Franz Deflorian, an interior decorator.

At age 16 she met her first husband, Othmar Vockner, a soldier. He was killed on the Russian front in 1941 in the early years of World War II, just three years after their marriage, when she was 21.

She studied sculpting at the Vienna School of Wood Sculpture and then later at the School of Wood Sculpture in Hallstatt from 1943 to 1947. Her studies were interrupted during the war and she made bombs in a munitions factory for a time, eventually graduating as a teacher in Hallstadt in 1947.

At the Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre Mimovich was unable to practice her craft, becoming homesick and finding the place bleak & boring. Originally, the Stations were set in a frame, but after the church underwent a refurbishment in 2016, the Stations were removed from the frames and mounted against a copper background. Today her works are also held in a number of public and private collections across 5 continents, including the Australian Catholic University Art Collection, the Mawson Inter-Denominational chapel in Antarctica, and in the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. The figures have simplified forms, typical of mid-20th century modernism, and are now spread across the Alexandra Gardens in Kew. The works reproduced on the stamps were 'Mother Mary and the infant Jesus' painted c.1980, and the 'Untitled (Holy Family) ' painted c.1970's. Both are held in the Australian Catholic University Art Collection.