‘No one is watching you’ brings together over 20 works of Melbourne-based, New Zealand-born artist Ronnie van Hout. For the past 30 years, van Hout’s distinctive brand of existential absurdism and tragicomic characters have simultaneously unsettled and beguiled audiences. Featuring loans from public institutions and private collections across Australia and New Zealand, the exhibition includes key works such as Ersatz (Alien) (2003), BED/SIT (2008), and Sick Child 2 (2016) as well as two new major projects, alongside works in sculpture, video, embroidery and text.
Curator Melissa Keys comments, ‘The multitude of protagonists populating van Hout’s work includes figures from pop culture, peculiar everymen and wicked self-portraits. The latter appear to theatrically seize the artistic limelight while at the same time attempting to elude its searching glare. Van Hout’s practice deliberately blurs the boundaries between self and other, artist and audience, tragedy and farce, at once humorously and poignantly exploring powerful sensations of the contemporary human condition.’

Ronnie van Hout, End Doll, 2007. Courtesy the artist and University of Canterbury Art Collection, Christchurch, New Zealand
Buxton Contemporary
Until 21 October, 2018
Melbourne