David Musgrave

Thirteen works [‘Dark plane’, ‘Reverse drawing no. 2’, ‘Reverse drawing no. 1’, ‘Plane with Scored Figure’, ‘Plane with embossed figure’, ‘Television picture no. 6’, ‘Television picture no. 5’, ‘Rope animal’, ‘Crochet animal’, ‘Untitled, Film’, ‘Transparent stick figure’, ‘Stick figure (morning)’] were shown in David Musgrave's first solo exhibition in New York. There was one other work in this exhibition, ‘Opener’ 2007.

The thirteen works by Musgrave contributed to and offered a critique of current ideas about materiality. He was concerned with the way artworks become hypothetical bodies, literal displacements of their makers and viewers and possessors of a sort of prosthetic subjectivity. This proposed an alternative to both the literalism with which matter is generally treated in contemporary art and the rationalisation of matter as yet another vehicle of signification. Both of these positions seemed to Musgrave to have lost any force. The material object in this group of drawings and sculptures was conceived of as a more irrational and contradictory entity, both virtual and actual, hermetic and accessible, something self-evidently exterior to the viewing and making subject, but also constitutive of it. This picked up a problematic aspect of the Surrealist found object (with its apparent power to facilitate the psychic fulfilment of a given individual) and makes it the aim of a highly controlled form of fabrication.

Through drawings and sculptures created over the past two years, the artist explores his ongoing preoccupation with the abstraction inherent in representation and the transformative capacity of materials.

Musgrave's work examines the relation between thoughts and things, ideas and objects. He produces images and forms that unsettle distinctions between inner and outer realms. The apparent accessibility of the simple human or animal schema that underpins much of his imagery forms a counterpoint to Musgrave's many-layered approach. His drawings often resemble documents of artifacts that hint at the primitive or the paranormal. Close viewing reveals a highly detailed evocation of fictive but perfectly plausible surfaces created with graphite.

Rope animal is a meticulous rendering of an imaginary sculpture depicted as an image on a folded sheet of paper. The bulky and tactile character of the conjured object is made almost immaterial by its passage through layers of representation. Musgrave achieves a similar effect by different means in Film, a multi-part aluminum sculpture of a figure that appears to be made of tape. He sculpts the same figure in 35 poses, ultimately creating a progression in which the figure turns over twice. The 'film' unfolds in the mind rather than in literal time and space.

Musgrave draws on what might appear to be opposed positions, fusing a pleasure in inventing form with rigorous, sometimes alienated processes of replication. His elusive imagery combined with his technical precision imbues the work with complex tensions, testing our notions of perception and subjective reality.

(from Luhring Augustine)

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