Uncured

 Ronnie van Hout is the recipient of an Arts Foundation Laureate Award - made in 2005.

(Text below from the Institute of Modern Art's website, profiling their current exhibition).

There's something rotton in the state of Ronnie. Melbourne artist Ronnie van Hout is a master of slapstick existentialism. His tragicomic works mash-up Sartre and Beckett with The Two Ronnies and The Nutty Professor. Often bearing his own features, van Hout's figurative sculptures beg to be read as doppelgangers, mini-mes, and selves from a parallel universe. In Sick Child 2 he presents himself child scale, in his PJs, one arm in a sling, the other hand down his pants-his adult face scowling. What would Hetty Johnson make of this image? Do we read it as an adult with childish features or as a child with adult features; as sick child or childish sicko? If this work is hideously abject, the iconic Failed Robot leans the other way. Apertures in its metallic-grey geometric-block body reveal fleshy human eyeballs and human-gums-and-teeth-vestiges of the organic. The frailty of the organic body is also a theme in Van Hout's cryptic installation Hold That Thought. In a clinical-white room, we find a desicated corpse in PJs scrunched up in a bathroom cupboard-like it died and dried there. Next to casts of six ripe potatoes are wrinkly casts of the same potatoes gone to seed. Alongside a molecule-like sculpture made of spheres is another of a picturesque male head breaking out in warts. In this contemporary vanitas, the viewer is left to join the dots.