Born in Invercargill in 1977, Rohan
Wealleans attended Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts,
graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Painting in
2000. Wealleans went on to pursue a Masters in Fine Arts at Elam,
graduating in 2003.
Producing what can loosely be
described as 'sculptural painting', Wealleans' works stretch and in
some places even pierce the boundaries of what is generally held to
be the disciplines of painting, sculpture and even relief etching.
Indeed, Wealleans would describe his work simply as 'painting' -
relief, sculptural or otherwise - for, as he has argued, "It's
still a surface, it's just it's not a flat surface".
Wealleans' devotion to the
multifarious properties of paint and the process of layering gives
him scope to explore ideas of exposition - of what lies underneath
in both bodily and painterly attributes. Wealleans' works move from
the solidly abstract, with an insistence on exposing the innards of
the work (which Wealleans has carefully constructed through the
atonal layering of house paint and the surgical flaying and
dissecting of the work that exposes his process); to the
metaphorical, complete with allusions to swollen pregnant bellies,
microscopic organisms,
spores or fungal growths, or geological strata; to the plainly
lewd with their labial slits and bulbous protrusions; to the
realm of the figurative, stretching between the recesses of his own
imagination and the use of his painterly technique to
cross-pollinate pop cultural references to the grotesque and the
fascination with the 'other' commonly found in mutant superhero
comic books, vintage horror stories and science fiction.
In 2004, Wealleans was selected as part of Te Papa's the "Art of
the Nation: 1940 to today" that showcased the work of over 100 of
New Zealand's most significant artists. In 2005, he won the Waikato
Art Award and was made the prestigious Frances Hodgkins Fellow at
Otago University, a residency that culminated in a solo show and
catalogue produced by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Wealleans'
gigantic fibreglass, steel and house paint 'sculpture' Tingler
was awarded the 2006 James Wallace Trust Paramount Award and in
2007 his work was selected for inclusion in the national survey
show Prospect 2007 at the Wellington City Gallery. He has
recently been published in influential art commentator Warwick
Brown's Seen This Century as one of Brown's 100 artists to
watch and continues to produce work from his central Auckland
studio.