Profile

Simon Strong and Robert Doble photographed by Søren Solkær

With a collaboration spanning several years and four major exhibitions, the work of Robert Doble & Simon Strong is a unique combination of cutting edge photographic technologies and the time honoured use of paint in abstraction. While both artists are established solo careers, their body of collaborative work represents a self-contained and potent stream of artistic expression.

Fusing the tradition and beauty of the nude in art with genetic engineering, medicine, viral outbreaks and science fiction, the works of Doble & Strong are presented, vitrine-like, in perspex cases, their overwhelming beauty counter-balanced by the unsettling appearance of biological growths and fungal and bacterial blooms. The bodies of their subjects, while smooth and pristine are often opened with surgical precision, or conversely, pierced from within by the protrusion of horns or bone. The paint itself begins to suggest internal organs and fluids flooding to the surface or laid open and bare from the removal of skin.

Robert Doble

Born in England. Resides and works in Melbourne, Australia

Robert Doble is a British-born Australian artist living and working in Melbourne.Robert Doble studied at the Chelsea School of Art in London. In 2006 he won the Ergon Energy Central Queensland Art Award and was a finalist in the 55th Blake Prize for Religious Art and the Williamstown Tattersalls Art Prize. Doble is represented in the National Gallery of Victoria with a painting from his Gravity series of 2000, as well as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Rockhampton Art Gallery, The Botanical Restaurant, and private collections in Australia, Japan, UK, USA, Italy and Spain.

Simon Strong

Born in Vietnam. Resides and works in Melbourne, Australia

Simon Strong has a bachelor of Graphic Design from the National School of Design. Strong has been included in numerous group shows including “Snap Freeze: Still Life Now”, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2007 and “Light Sensitive: Contemporary Australian Photography from the Loti Smorgon Fund” at the National Gallery of Victoria 2006-07. Most recently, he was one of five photographers to be included in the exhibition “Phantasia” at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, which then toured around Australia and was also shown at the Gallery of the Australian Embassy as part of “Photoquai”, Paris at the end of 2009.