It was a big day for Melbourne’s public sculpture, a sunny summer morning at the MCG on Thursday the 22nd of December, 2011 – I wasn’t there I was watching the live broadcast of the event on the ABC News 24.
There were speeches from the Australia Post sponsors and the former cricket captain, Mark Taylor. The speeches were about Shane Warne being “immortalized in bronze” and joining the other statues of Australian sporting heroes at the MCG. After the statue was unveiled Shane Warne made a speech. Speculating on the bowling action of the statue Warne said: “ it looks like a leg break”.
In all the speeches there was no mention of the sculptor but this is typical fate for sculptors, like architects are often anonymous. This is because a sculptor, like an architect, cannot work alone; they need commissions and must work within the tight constraints imposed by those commissions.
The larger than life statue of Shane Warne is by Melbourne sculptor, Louis Lauman who has made all the statues around the MCG. Louis Lauman was born in the Netherlands in 1958 and immigrated to Australia with his family two years later. When he isn’t modelling statues in clay, he works as a technician at Meridian Sculpture Founders and lectures in sculpture at RMIT. Lauman has made many sports statues, religious statues, war memorial statues and the ‘Magic Pudding’ sculpture at the Children’s Garden in Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne.
The new statue is located at Gate 2 of the MCG. It is part of the Australia Post Avenue of Legends series. Australia Post has agreed to sponsor five statues for in Yarra Park over the next five years. (See my post about the other sports themed sculptures in Melbourne: Sporting Heroes).
Sporting sculpture in Melbourne continues to reflect the classical ideals of classical Greek sculpture. The point of classical Greek sculpture was to create memorials to idolized individuals, like athletes. Lauman is aware that the contemporary art world “loathes my sort of work; it has a visceral hatred of it. It took me a decade to make my mark and I realised that if I wanted to do this, I’d have to give something up, and I gave up the gallery circuit a long time ago.” I must admit that I don’t admire Lauman’s statues but I loath Shane Warne more.
Black Mark 