Steven Rendall

Security, Storage & Recreation

8 April - 1 May 2010

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.

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.