2021 River Capital Commission
HEADLESS

Rob McLeish

Gertrude has been pleased to announce the third River Capital Commission, an annual commissioning initiative developed in partnership with and through the generous support of River Capital. This partnership enables Gertrude to work with leading artists to commission a major new project to be presented as a flagship exhibition within our artistic program.

For the 2021 River Capital Commission, Gertrude was honoured to work with Melbourne-based artist Rob McLeish toward the presentation of HEADLESS, his most expansive institutional project to date. Unfolding across the gallery spaces and foyer volumes at Gertrude Contemporary, HEADLESS reprised a selection of key sculptural works of the past decade and introduced a number of newly produced works enabled through the commission. Taking form as a total environment orchestrated by the artist in response to the architecture of the spaces, HEADLESS brought new and recent works into dialogue to focus on the sculptural realm of McLeish's practice.

Artistically active for more than 15 years, McLeish returned to Melbourne after a period living and working in Los Angeles and New York, where he exhibited extensively and worked in the studio of Jeff Koons. Having been included within numerous museum exhibitions, HEADLESS was the first opportunity for the artist to develop a large-scale institutional solo exhibition in Australia. Rob’s practice spans sculpture, installation, printmaking and drawing. With exceptional skills as a technical producer, the artist engages in highly complex material experimentation. Central within his practice is the reconsideration of monuments and monumental gestures in modernist art, tempered with an overlay of material fatigue and the passing of time. This too carries through into his motifs around sport and endurance, which are similarly called into question through the representation of contortion and distortion. With humour, exemplary production skills, a strong comprehension of spatiality and timely questioning of the monument in history, Rob is both an artist of significance and highly deserving of an opportunity to work on a project of scale and importance. Rob is an alumnus of the Gertrude Studio Program, participating from 2009-2010.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Distortions, Neon Parc, Melbourne; Thanks Criticism!, Kansas Gallery, New York, USA (2016); Lapsink, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2013); Art Contemporary Los Angeles Art Fair, Neon Parc, Los Angeles, USA (2013); Concept Fatigue, DB, Sydney (2012); Keep Art Evil, Monash University, Melbourne (2010); NADA Art Fair, Neon Parc, Miami, USA (2010); Afterparty, West Space, Melbourne (2008); Pissing In The Infinity Pool, Ocular Lab, Melbourne (2009); and Step Into The Light, TCB, Melbourne (2008). Selected recent group exhibitions include: Verus Rodin: Bodies Across Space and Time, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2017); Vitreous Humour, Kansas Gallery, New York, USA (2016); An Imprecise Science, Artspace, Sydney (2015); Sequester, Australian Embassy, Washington DC (2014); Basil Sellers Art Prize, Ian Potter Museum, Melbourne University, Melbourne (2014); Reinventing the Wheel: The Readymade Century, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2013); Parallel Collisions: 2012 Biennial of Australian Contemporary Art, Art Gallery Of South Australia, Adelaide; The Drawing Room, Breenspace, Sydney (2012); and Life. Death. Thereafter. Silvershot, Melbourne (2008).

Rob McLeish is represented by Neon Parc, Melbourne. 

Download the exhibition roomsheet here.