Lot 80

International Wool Secretariat building, Ilkley, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Meszaros studied architecture there and then building engineering in Vienna between 1919 and 1927. He went to the Academie Julien in Paris where L. Henri Bouchard and P. M. Landowski introduced him to abstract and cubist forms; at night he learned carving in Jószef Csáky's studio. After his return to Budapest he worked as an architect but left to avoid the impending war and arrived in Melbourne in 1939 and was employed by the architectural firms of J. V. T. Ward and Marsh & Michaelson. In 1940 he began to make a living from sculpture. His early works included a series of three carved stone figures for Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney: 'Maternity' (1944), 'The Surgeon' (1945) and 'King George V' (1946). In 1949 he went to England where he was commissioned to sculpt the altarpiece for St Anselm's Chapel in Canterbury Cathedral. He returned to Australia and was commissioned by many schools and churches including Shore School, St Peter's Cathedral Adelaide, All Saints Church Brisbane, and his bas-reliefs in stone and bronze adorn many civic buildings, among them the Shrine of Remembrance, Brisbane, the Supreme Court, Darwin, and Sydney's international air-terminal with his memorial to Charles Ulm.