Rob McLeod: Excuse Me Mr Frankenstein, Vlad Is Outside Feeding

"Paint has been around for a long time, and so has the pleasure in using it and the satisfaction of looking at paintings. So, painting will never really die. It is the Vampire which feeds on everything." — Rob McLeod, 2022

In Excuse Me Mr Frankenstein, Vlad Is Outside Feeding, Rob McLeod presents a swarm of unruly characters who gleefully disobey the conventional boundaries of painting. Taking inspiration from comic books and medieval friezes alike, his cartoon-esque figures extend from the bounds of the gallery walls, crawl off the page, invade other spaces, and bend their moveable appendages.

Often Frankenstein-ed together from older works, his raucous paintings are a delightfully demented hybrid of pop culture, social commentary, and art history. Here, rocket ships sprout Mickey Mouse ears, Batman crawls out of a medieval altarpiece and colourful rats hide around every corner.

Soon after emigrating from Glasgow in 1972, McLeod rose to prominence in the New Zealand art world for his minimalist and abstract expressionist canvasses. Never an artist content with conforming to the predictable, however, for the past fifty years he has continuously reinvented his own practice, tirelessly experimenting with the possibilities of painting from his Wellington studio.

Funny and dark, McLeod’s figurative paintings laugh in the face of “good taste” and pretentious art gallery decorum, drawing as much on the gothic monsters of pulpy novels as they do from post-modernism. Yet, behind the bizarre expressions and monstrous limbs, lies his genuine affection for the act of painting, and an enduring belief in the constant reinvention of its form.

Read the exhibition catalogue here.