Charles Robb

Charles Robb

Charles Robb is a graduate of Victorian College of the Arts, now based in Brisbane. Robb’s work has been seen in numerous group and solo exhibitions including The Day the Machine Started, (dianne tanzer gallery + projects Melbourne Art Fair 2010), Scope Miami Art Fair (with Hous Projects, USA, 2009), Millwork (dianne tanzer gallery + projects, 2009), Temperature: Contemporary Queensland Sculpture (Museum of Brisbane, 2004), Gulliver’s Travels (Monash University Museum of Art and interstate venues, 2002-4), Support (Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2000) and Primavera (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2000).


He has been short-listed three times for the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, winning Judge’s Commendations in 2002 and 2005. He has received project grants from Arts Queensland (2000 and 2004) and the Australia Council (2001) and he was awarded an inaugural Freedman Foundation Scholarship to research Baroque religious sculpture in Spain (2001). In 2006, Robb was awarded the Australia Council Studio Residency, Cite des Internationales, Paris. In 2012 Robb's work was shortlisted for the prestigious McClelland Sculpture Prize.


In addition to appearing in catalogues, his work has featured in reviews in Art and Australia, Artlink, Art Monthly, Australian Art Collector, Broadsheet, Eyeline, World Sculpture News and Contemporary. His writing has been published in Eyeline, unMagazine and Photofile.


Charles currently holds the position of Lecturer in Visual Art at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane.

 "Protrusion I is a self-portrait bust, rendered with a high degree of naturalism. The work depicts a male subject with a bulbous white form projecting from it nasal and oral orifices. The work forms part of the artist’s ongoing self-portraiture project, in which the tensions between objectivity and subjectivity that pervade the self-portrait as a genre are cross referenced with the notions of materiality and interiority integral to the language of sculpture. The iconography of the work parodies the connection between amorphous form and artistic subjectivity in the history of sculpture. The dough-like forms that emerge from the figure thus refer to a sense of ‘inner life’ while also operating as more analytical projections of the cavities of the bust – areas of the where the mimetic program are necessarily suspended. The result is a figure that appears to be in a state of resigned suffocation. The work was selected for the 2005 National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. The work was later included in the group show Crash (and other earthy pleasures) at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery at the University of Western Australia in Perth."

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