Biography

For over thirty years the artist Robert MacPherson has produced objects and installations in which he exploits the emotive tension between anonymous functional objects and a highly specific, visually allusive language with which they are named, often drawn from Australian working class slang. Trevor Smith

Long considered an important Australian artist, Robert MacPherson uses the rich and colourful culture of his rural childhood to address the environmental, colloquial and distinctive aspects of Australian landscape and language. Over the course of his career he has worked with text, drawings, paintings, dramatic room-scale installations, objects and sculpture.

His work explores the philosophical propositions of what constitutes a work of art and often incorporates familiar imagery and everyday materials such as road signs, paint brushes, office stationery, shovels and blankets.

For the 9th Sharjah Biennial Macpherson presented a variety of existing sculptural, installation and painted works covering a period from 1973 to 1993. Exhibited across two adjacent spaces in the Sharjah Art Museum the collected works provided a compelling glimpse into the distinct poetics of Macpherson’s life and work.

Macpherson’s work has been numerous exhibitions throughout his career including major solo presentations at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2007) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2001). His work was exhibited in the Sydney Biennale (2010, 2002), the Sharjah Biennial (2009), the University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane (2008), The Hague Sculpture Festival, Netherlands (2007), the October Salon, Belgrade (2006) and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2003).

Robert Macpherson was born in 1937 Brisbane, Australia where he continues to live and work.

October 2010

Quote from The Specific Labour of Sheela Gowda, Afterall, Autumn/Winter 2009