Ricky Swallow Australia, b. 1974

Ricky Swallow (b. 1974, San Remo, Australia) transforms everyday materials and objects into meticulously arranged compositions, suggesting a unique approach in creating sculptures as a process of object translation. Contemplating themes of life, death and everything in-between, Swallow’s practice addresses the relationship between the state of an object and various processes that influence its transformation.

Swallow’s current body of work is a bricolage of recurring forms of everyday objects, which he casts in bronze. The familiar, yet uncanny groupings of ropes, chairs, and hooks possess an austere discipline and invisible tension within its composition that memorializes the transience of movement. Balanced with a Surrealist wit, Swallow’s works are on the cusp of climax, arrested in space—forever destined to be in a state of potentials, anticipations, and [‘what if’s]. Swallow creates this unambiguous perspective in order to acknowledge and emphasize a before and after of the sculpture’s current state, directing viewers to face these objects for what they are, have been and could be.

Ricky Swallow has been subject to solo exhibitions at Modern Art, London; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles; the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California (with Lesley Vance); MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York; the Australian Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale, Italy, and many more. He has been included in a number of group exhibitions, including Ahmanson Gallery, Irvine, California; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; Whitney Biennial 2014, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Made in L.A. 2014, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Swallow’s work is in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California, and more.

Swallow lives and works in Los Angeles.