David Austen
the stars above the ocean the ocean beneath the stars
TOTAH, New York
15 February - April 22 2018
The exhibition features selections from David Austen’s career-long engagement with painting and watercolour alongside two films. This will be the London-based artist’s first New York solo exhibition, offering a view into to a fertile imagination that transitions effortlessly between the formal demands of different media.
Austen’s works have a winsome quality about them that contrasts with the stark severity of their technical execution. Often presenting unsettling themes; a smoking disconsolate moon, or watercolours of lonely, misshapen figures engaged in ritualistic acts.
His films continue the mindful austerity displayed in his art. In End of Love, staged in an empty theater, with no audience present, characters both folkloric and alien speak to their frustrations concerning the disquieting inconstancy of love. As each character gradually reveals him- or herself in the form of a poetic monologue, observers become thrust into the role of a voyeur
witnessing heartbreaking soliloquies to nothingness.
David Austen - the stars above the ocean the ocean beneath the stars
February 3, 2018
