David Austen

David Austen is a hard artist to pin down. His exquisitely delicate paintings on flax canvas and paper, ink drawings, and clumsily beautiful suspended objects build together like the ingredients of an odd narrative: a series of wonderful fragments, each standing alone yet seeming part of a bigger story. He borrows images and snatches texts from old black and white photographs, film noir, and 19th Century literature, re-presenting them in works that create a dark, bittersweet world inhabited by strange and lovelorn characters.

In recent years, Austen has made two large groups of etchings which seem like strange storyboards for these fractured tales, and which in turn have led to the making of works in film. His first, Smoking Moon (shown at both Camden Arts Centre and the British Film Institute) was followed by Crackers, commissioned for his most comprehensive solo exhibition to date at Milton Keynes Gallery (2007), which was subsequently screened at the Locarno Film Festival and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. In 2008 he collaborated with the artist Enzo Cucchi to make a short film in Rome, Man Smoking.

David Austen had a solo show, My love I have been digging up my own bones in the garden again at Ingleby Gallery in 2009. In the same year he was also the Stanley Picker Fellow at Kingston University where he wrote and directed his first feature length film End of Love. End of Love was screened at Modern Art Oxford alongside his solo show Smoke Town, 11 December 2010 – 20 February 2011.

As part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2012 Austen’s newest film work, The Gorgon’s Dream, will be installed in The Burn’s Monument on Regent’s Road (21 – 24 June).

David Austen was in conversation with Simon Groom (Director of Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art) at Ingleby Gallery on 10 October 2009. To request a transcript please email alice@inglebygallery.com.