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Installation view of My love, I have been digging up my own bones in the garden again
Ingleby Gallery, October 2009
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.
Last year David Austen was the Stanley Picker Fellow at Kingston University where he wrote and directed his first feature length film End of Love which will be screened this year at Modern Art Oxford.
David Austen had a solo show My love I have been digging up my own bones in the garden again at Ingleby Gallery 10 October - 14 November 2009.
Austen was in conversation with Simon Groom (Director of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Galleries of Scotland) at Ingleby Gallery, 10 October. To request an edited transcript of the talk, please email alice@inglebygallery.com
Links for David Austen