Robert Rooney

Robert Rooney (1937–2017) 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 (Phillip Institute), 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 (1980-July 1982) and as Melbourne Art Critic for The Australian (October 1982–99). He died on 21 March 2017.

Selected exhibitions

 * 2013 Robert Rooney, the Box Brownie Years 1956–58, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne.
 * 2012 Play, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
 * 2010 Endless Present: Robert Rooney and Conceptual Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Retrospective with context provided by art donated from his collection of local and international conceptual art contemporary to the time.
 * 2009 Cubism and Australian Art, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.
 * 1990 The Readymade Boomerang: Certain Relations in 20th Century Art, 8th Biennale of Sydney.
 * 1971 4 Conceptual Artists: Mel Ramsden, Ian Burn, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Rooney, Pinacotheca, Melbourne, with catalogue by Rooney.
 * 1968 The Field, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1968, seminal exhibition introducing international colour field painting into Australia.

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

Collections
Rooney's work is held in a number of state, regional and university collections, including:
 * National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
 * National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
 * Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
 * Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
 * Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
 * Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.