Patrick Pound

Patrick Pound is a collector. You might say: the collection is his medium. Through complex arrangements and installations of photographs and objects selected from the artist’s expansive archives, Pound’s practice explores the art of collecting and the ways in which ‘things’ and the relationship between them can create a new logic or narrative for the viewer to decipher.

‘I treat the world as a puzzle to be solved’, says Patrick Pound. He sits for hours every day on eBay, scouring the site for random snapshots, discarded family photographs, defunct newspaper archives and cinema stills – then creates installations from his vast collection of found photography. ‘My work has the look of being made by someone who, having tried to explain the world and having failed, has been reduced to collecting it’, he jokes. 

(from Dead or Alive. Disquieting photographs to haunt your dreams. an interview with the artist by Sean O’hagan, first published in The Guardian, 14 December 2015.)

Patrick Pound has presented regular solo exhibitions since the 1980s and has been the subject of museum exhibitions including Under Lamplight, Albert Tucker and Patrick Pound, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2021), Summer Holiday 1962, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand (2019) Patrick Pound. Photography and Air, curated by Susan Bright as part of PHotoESPAÑA, Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid, Spain (2019),The Point of Everything, Adelaide Biennale, Art Gallery of South Australia (2018), Patrick Pound: On Reflection, City Gallery Wellington, Te Whare Toi, in association with Te Papa Tongarewa Museum and National Gallery of New Zealand Wellington, New Zealand (2018) & Patrick Pound: The Great Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2017).

Recent group exhibitions include:The Data Imaginary: Fears and Fantasies, Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane (2021) The Other Portrait, curated by Cherine Fahd and Julie Rrap, UTS Gallery and SCA Gallery, Sydney (2021), Walker Evans Revisited, Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany (2020), Shadow catchers, curated by Isobel Parker Philip, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, Australia (2020), Beyond Place: Australian Contemporary Photography, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego (2019), Dark (Other) Times, Dark MoFo, Hobart, Tasmanaia (2018), TarraWarra International 2017: All that is solid…, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Melbourne (2017), The Photograph and Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2015).

His work is held in most major public collections in New Zealand and Australia.