Rosemary Madigan

Rosemary Wynnis Madigan (5 December 1926 – 12 February 2019) was an Australian sculptor, stonecarver and woodcarver who focused on the human figure. Born in Glenelg to the geologist Cecil Madigan, she decided on a career as a sculptor at the age of 12 and studied in schools in Adelaide and Sydney. Madigan won a three-year scholarship to study abroad from 1950 to 1953. She began teaching pottery, painting and sculpture at various schools between the 1950s and the 1960s. Madigan was in a working partnership with the constructivist sculptor Robert Klippel until the latter's death in 2001 and won the Wynne Prize for a carved sandstone torso in 1986.

Early life Madigan was born on 5 December 1926 in Glenelg, South Australia. She was the youngest of five children of the geologist Cecil Madigan. She grew up in the Adelaide suburb of Blackwood and became interested in her father's small collection of Aboriginal artefacts and exhibited a preoccupation with the solid world, wanting to observe objects. Madigan commented on her experience, "It fired a child’s imagination. Why would you want to be a painter when the physicality of such an object was in your midst?" attending the Girls Central Art School in 1939. Madigan went to night classes in drawing at the East Sydney Technical College (later the National Art School) and was taught by Liz Blaxland. She later studied sculpture under Lyndon Dadswell in 1941 to 1942. Madigan returned to Adelaide in 1944 and did a further three years of evening classes at the South Australian School of Art, while gaining employment at an department store. she was the third sculptor to receive the award. She was given the freedom to decide where she would study outside of Australia. Madigan travelled to London to study a diploma in carving at the John Cass College from 1952 to 1953 and acquaint herself with post-war British sculpture. This included a year in Italy, and began to teach sculpture at the East Sydney Technical College and at the Sculpture Centre.

Analysis Her works were inspired by the traditions of Asian and European sculptures. Madigan focused mainly on the human torso; according to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, this allowed her to "create sculptures which, at their best, have the sensuousness, subtlety and rigour of the greatest of the Indian carvings she admires." Critical analysis often assessed her work as "a restrained homage to the preoccupations of an earlier generation of modern figurative sculptors" and her most successful works were said to have a quality similar to the artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.