Robert Rooney


Robert Rooney was an artist and art critic from Melbourne, Australia, and a leading figure in Australian Conceptual art.

Biography

Born in Melbourne on 24 September 1937, Rooney lived in Northcote until December 1939 when he moved to Broomfield Road, East Hawthorn. He trained at Swinburne College of Technology, Melbourne from 1954 to 1957, then at Preston Institute of Technology, between 1972 and 1973. His early work was hard-edged abstraction based on cereal packets, knitting patterns and suburban design for which, by the early 1960s, he had become well known. He gained national recognition with his inclusion in the seminal exhibition of colour field painting The Field exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and Art Gallery of [New South Wales] in 1968.
From 1969 to 1981 Rooney turned his attention to systematic photographic observation in a conceptual art mode, prior to which, from 1954 to 1963 he had used a Box Brownie camera to take photographs as references for his paintings, drawings and prints. Rooney, who stopped taking the serial photographs in 1975, said ‘I don’t particularly like photographer’s photographs.’. After this period he returned to painting In 1982 with ‘The Red Card, Australia’, 1944—45’ based on a Communist Party membership card he found in a book 20 years earlier. He continued plays on such printed ephemera, and it was included by Paul Taylor in Popism, a major exhibition at the NGV of Post-Pop art.
Rooney wrote extensively on Australian art as critic for the Melbourne Age and as Melbourne Art Critic for The Australian. He died on 21 March 2017.

Selected exhibitions

Between 12 November 2010 and 27 March 2011, the National Gallery of Victoria held a retrospective of Rooney's work, titled 'Endless Present'.

Collections

Rooney's work is held in a number of state, regional and university collections, including: