[1]Rohan Wealleans was born in 1977 in Invercargill, New Zealand. In 2000 he graduated with a BFA (Painting) from Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland and in 2003 he gained a MFA (Painting). He was the winner of the 15th Annual Wallace Art Award in 2006 and has exhibited widely in New Zealand and internationally since then, including the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010. Wealleans’ monstrous creations morph and bleed between painting and sculpture. Their wild and unruly appearance gives the impression that the artist has grown them in a subterranean lair through a mixture of wizardry and weird science rather than having created them in a white-walled studio. Embarrassingly tactile, the gnarls, knobs and bejewelled facets that either sprout from the wall or create caverns, recesses and bulbous protrusions call up mysterious voids and a grotesque fertility. Wealleans layers paint on to fibreglass and polystyrene, in a joyful accretion of colour and texture and can amass up to 80 layers of paint. The titles of his works combine a love of science fiction and B-grade cinema with a metonymic sense of humour.
Wealleans is represented by Hamish McKay Gallery [2], Wellington New Zealand and Roslyn Noxley9 Gallery [3], Sydney, Australia.