- Artist
- David Austen born 1960
- Medium
- Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions
- Support: 1680 × 1520 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased 2013
- Reference
- T13901
Summary
Two Trees 2002 is an oil painting on canvas that depicts two leafless white trees whose branches are closely intertwined. Simple graphic outlines describe the skeletal network of bare branches set against a solid black background that refutes any reference to a naturalistic context. The pared-down scene might suggest a sense of despair, abandonment and pain. Trees feature prominently in Austen’s work and, whilst most of his canvases are rich in references and allusions, the series of works depicting trees that he began in the late 1990s are characterised by their muteness and soberness. Delineated against a solid monochrome background, they may be read as depictions of trees in winter, or images of death or damage. For example, Two Broken Trees 1997 (reproduced in Mead Gallery 1997, p.21) depicts two trees with their branches snapped and twisted by crossfire, an image that was drawn from a photograph of trees on a battlefield taken during the American Civil War. Curators Ruth Charity and Amanda Daly have noted how the damaged trees ‘could refer to a broken relationship, a sudden violence, the weathering of a storm’ (quoted in Mead Gallery 1997, p.7).
Austen works across a range of media, from painting and watercolour to drawing, film and photography. Around 1990 he produced many works on canvas depicting a single organic form isolated on a pale, monochrome ground. Sometimes recognisably figurative, sometimes wholly abstract, and sometimes between the two, these images are characterised by a formal simplicity that emphasises the sensuous texture of the oil paint from which they are composed. After this time, Austen began to work on a series of paintings on canvas that followed very simple structures and that offered no explanations and no narrative. Their elusive meanings were complemented by an imagery that mixed figurative and abstract motifs. Paintings such as Blue Shapes 2004 (Tate T13912) illustrate this more abstracted approach.
Further reading
David Austen: Paintings and Works on Paper, exhibition catalogue, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry 1997.
David Austen, exhibition catalogue, Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes 2007.
Carmen Juliá
August 2013
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