Ronald Charles Robertson-SwannOAM (born 20 February 1941)[1] is an Australian sculptor, best known for his controversial abstract public sculpture Vault (1980), located in Melbourne. He is also known for the sculpture Leviathan Play (1985), located in Brisbane.[2][3][4]
Art career
Vault has been described as being in the Anthony Caro style,[5] which he adopted after studying at Saint Martin's School of Art, London, in the 1960s. He studied under Lyndon Dadswell and was an assistant to Henry Moore.[6] He is Head of Sculpture at the National Art School and is the artistic adviser to the popular annual exhibition Sculpture by the Sea.[7] He was a founding member of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council[8] and has won numerous awards including the Comalco Invitational Sculpture Award, the Transfeld Prize and the Alice Prize.[8]
Graeme Sturgeon, the pre-eminent Australian sculpture historian and critic, described Robertson-Swann in 1980 as "the most consistent of the Classic Formalist, that is, the one most concerned to produce a sculpture which, while obviously of its era, transcends considerations of style in search of a timeless sense of rightness."[6]
^ ab"Ron Robertson-Swann, AO". National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition 2003. National Gallery of Australia. Archived from the original on 28 November 2012. Retrieved 9 January 2013.