David Musgrave
- Info
- Exhibitions
- Works
- CV
Black Device, 2005
Born: 1973, London
Based: London
Musgrave graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Chelsea in 1997. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Greengrassi in 2006; Marc Foxx in 2005 and the group show ‘Draw: Conversations on the Legacy of Drawing’ at Middlesborough Museum of Modern Art, 2007. Musgrave has curated several exhibitions including ‘Waste Material’, The Drawing Room, London, 2005 and ‘Living Dust’ at Norwich Gallery, 2004. He lives and works in London.
The semblance of a human form emerges often in David Musgrave’s work, through multiple and exacting means – perhaps as an illusionistic puddle of coloured acrylic in the shape of a body, or as a trompe l’oeil wall painting that appears to be a stick figure made from masking tape. An approximate figure is spelt out on the floor in pieces of paper - in actuality the form has been fabricated from sheets of aluminum, painted white. The deliberately misleading appearance of works such as these invites an initial misrecognition of materials, in which the actual object is cloaked in the possibility of being something else. This intriguing process of representational wrongfooting is extended in the trope of the implied body. In Musgrave’s Television drawings odd white figures hover against a dense background of horizontal graphite lines, like the amorphous glow that used to hover in the centre of the television screen after shutdown. These phantom creatures, with twisted limbs, implied and absent features, are preserved on the page, but remain somehow unapproachable. The closer we get, the more their considered vagueness insists they remain unknown.
