Ronnie van Hout (born 22 January 1962) is a New Zealand artist and musician living in Melbourne, Australia.

He works across a wide variety of media including sculpture, video, painting, photography, embroidery, and sound recordings.

Born in Christchurch on 22 January 1962,[1] Van Hout attended the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury between 1980 and 1982, where he majored in film.

[2] In the early eighties while still studying at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts, van Hout became involved in the Christchurch music scene.

Initially he worked with The Pin Group, who were signed to Flying Nun Records, designing posters and filming them in action.

[3] Roger Shepherd, owner of Flying Nun, described van Hout’s work as, ‘colorful Warholian images’.

Reviewer Robin Neate commented of the exhibition that van Hout, ‘…conjured up as many meanings as you can bring to a work.’[11] 2003 I’ve Abandoned Me.

This survey exhibition curated by Justin Paton at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery toured in 2003 and 2004 to Auckland, Wellington and Palmerston North.

[12] Paton described van Hout’s career as, ‘[jutting] up on the horizon like a combined laboratory, hall of mirrors and haunted house.’[13] 2008 BED/SIT Artspace, Sydney.

[15] Curated by Justin Paton at the Christchurch Art Gallery it featured the work The Thing inspired by van Hout’s experience in the Antarctic.

Titled after the 1921 play by Czech playwright Karel Capek, the first to popularise the term robot, R. U. R. lay prone, as though just having fallen outside the Royal Exhibition Building during the opening of the Melbourne Art Fair.

[21] 2018 A Loss Again, Te Papa's Sculpture terrace featured an installation by van Hout of two replicas of his father’s tool shed.

[28] The giant hand sculpture was first installed on the roof of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu.

Van Hout was represented by No Exit Parts 1 and 2, 2003 which was purchased by the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

It's a different attitude [which was] seen as strangely old-fashioned…’[41] His exhibition at the Kunstlerhaus was an installation titled Back door and was described as, ‘devoted to memory and demonstrates – using an example from his own childhood – the impossibility of recalling one’s own history as a description of facts….’[42] Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate Award.

The residency enables artists to live and work in the small cottage in Sydney Street West that Rita Angus used as a studio and home during her time in Wellington.

[48] John Hurrell, Review of Who Goes There, EyeContact, 27 September 2009 John Hurrell, Review of The Other Mother, EyeContact, 28 June 2011 Tom Cardy, Van Hout's latest hits the Dowse, The DominionPost, 12 July 2012 Robert Leonard, Unnerved: The New Zealand Project, Eyeline, no.