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Bio
Steven Rendall was born in Salisbury, England in 1969 and moved to Australia in 2000. Since then he has held numerous exhibitions in Australia and the UK, most recently at Hell Gallery, (Melbourne, 2008), and in Reconstructing the Old House at The Ruskin Gallery (Cambridge, UK, 2009) – he was also a finalist in the 2009 Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize. His work is present in many notable private and public collections in Melbourne and the UK. Recent work has been purchased by the Monash University Museum of Art.
Citing the British artist Walter Sickert as an important influence on his painterly style, Rendall’s work displays a form and content that has attracted the attention of both critics and collectors. A key work in the exhibition is a large-scale painting on un-stretched linen titled Fountain (Rosemary’s Baby) that sprawls across 4.5m (image attached). Certain fountains, along with other apparently arbitrary images of television monitors, speedboats, clothing racks, shelving units and museum interiors are recurring motifs in Rendall’s paintings.
Rendall aims to ‘collect and synthesise’ images from around his home and en route to and from his Brunswick studio. Passing observations of window displays, charity shops and various light industrial warehouses are registered and recorded in conjunction with the accumulation of promotional flyers spruiking leisure activities and museum experiences. This shambolic collection of images is transcribed into an array of compositions in Rendall’s paintings. Images occasionally materialise in unlikely places, such as the spectral diver’s head that is resting on a warehouse shelf in the appropriately titled Storage.
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In the exhibition Security, Storage and Recreation, you are invited to enter the image bank of Steven Rendall; a ‘wake in fright’ experience where one can become immersed and caught up in the maelstrom of the artist’s visual language - a sequence of painterly dreams each similar yet different to the last.
Some comment from the artist on Fountain (Rosemary’s Baby):
It's a reconstituted and adapted image of the courtyard fountain you get a glimpse of at the beginning of Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) as the estate agent shows the couple around the Bramford apartment (which I believe is actually the Dakota building where John Lennon lived & died). The film is intensely nerve-racking, absurd and stylish, all qualities I consider necessary for the making and viewing of paintings these days.
SR 2009
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