Ingo Kleinert has worked as an art educator, an art curator and primarily as an artist.

 

He was born in Germany in 1941 and migrated to Australia with his family in 1949. From 1960 to 1963 he studied art at Caulfield Technical College, RMIT and Melbourne Teachers College. In 1968 Ingo travelled extensively in Europe and worked in London until returning to Australia in 1974. Ingo taught at the Canberra School of Art from 1976-1996. He directed ACT 1, 2 & 3 performance events in Canberra in 1978, 1980 and 1982 and was awarded an Australia Council Artists Development Grant in 1993.

 

Ingo Kleinert’s art practice spans a period of fifty years and is primarily about land, place and memory. During that period his practice has ranged across ceramics, photography and sculpture. In the 1980s he began working in found materials. His interest and passion for old and scavenged material grew not only from the necessity of survival and as a post war refugee in Germany and starting a new life in Australia, but also from the need to identify with locations (places) which inform the physical and conceptual reality of his work.

 

Since 2014 he has produced a group of cabinets based on 19th collector’s cabinets and secretaires using mainland and Tasmanian native timbers. The cabinets and their inscribed texts reference contemporary and historical issues relating to Australia’s Indigenous people, landscape and culture. In so doing the cabinets address our nearly 250 years of colonial history and our continued relationship and responsibility to the land shared with traditional owners.

 

Since 1975 Ingo has exhibited regularly with Legge Gallery and Boutwell Draper Gallery in Sydney and Christine Abrahams Gallery in Melbourne in addition to Goethe Institute, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra Museum and Art Gallery and the Drill Hall Gallery ANU in Canberra, the ICA in Sydney and the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide.

 

Ingo Kleinert is represented in private and corporate collections in Australia and overseas, in university collections and in state and regional galleries His work is also held by Art Bank, MONA, National Gallery of Australia and Parliament House Canberra. A monograph, Ingo Kleinert:Two Decades (2010), edited by Merryn Gates (www.merryngates.com) was published in 2010 by sfa press.

 

Ingo Kleinert currently lives and works in Hobart, Tasmania. 

 

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