RON MEERBEEK T.O.E. (Theory of Everything)

T.O.E. (Theory of Everything)
7 July – 6 August 2006

It is with enormous sadness that we announce the death of Ron Meerbeek – a vital colleague in the important early years of the gallery, a truly great artist and a wonderful friend. In both his painting and his writing he had a fierce imaginitive energy, intensely focussed with a caustic wit. This ran alongside a warmth and loyalty towards others and a stoical acceptance of his many years of imperfect health. He was missed when we didn’t see him as often as we would like; he is missed all the more now we no longer can. R.I.P. Ron Meerbeek , Geelong, 1959 – London, 2020 XXX

From the Dreamtime to Summer Bay, via the Village of the Damned, Australian painter Ron Meerbeek weaves Science and Soap-Opera with more ancient cosmologies. He appropriates, contorts and re-invents everything within his land/mindscape. Imaginary Beings populate unreal Edens, as Borges meets Greg Egan to spawn Wormhead, the Horror Tots and Stinky the Cat, cartoon characters who struggle with their own psychopathology and tell their stories around a pyre that Meerbeek prepares for them.

Elsewhere abstract clusters of bright dots and lozenges echo the magical patterning from older belief systems. Yet these are as figurative as any photo-booth portrait: spores on a microscope, the DNA that gives us our identities as well as that of the microbes that destroy us, the hectic aetiology of this disease called life.

It’s a Dog eat God world.