Daryl Austin Foundlore
Paintings and Drawings 2023- 2026
June 20 – July 26
Exhibition Launch Saturday June 27 at 2pm
My latest series of paintings and drawings uses imagery which has been primarily sourced from both anonymous and personal family histories, primarily through vintage, vernacular photographs found in antique stores and flea markets. These everyday images now divorced from the original familial narrative are both familiar and strange. There is a democracy of understanding and feeling, a democracy of imagery between ourselves and the hidden narrators of these images. The same tropes; an image of someone significant to another, a souvenir, a favoured place, our children, an event to be recorded, a touchstone. Though we recognise the tropes, the narratives which bind them have been lost but where narratives are curtailed, possibilities may be opened.
The original images are gradually recomposed, reconfigured and are replaced through the shifting process of painterly material transformation. A broken surface, a pixellated overlay, imagery lost and found. ghosted images, uncertainty, creating a spatial ambiguity of surface and pictorial distance where presence and absence, appearance and disappearance enforce uncanny imagery.
Daryl Austin "Beachboy" 2024, Oil on Linen 61 x 45 cm H x W
Daryl Austin BIO
Daryl Austin is an artist and lecturer, who has taught painting at Adelaide Central School of Art since 2001. His work hovers between realism and abstraction, exploring states of visual flux.
Born in Lincoln, England, Daryl Austin came to Australia and settled in Adelaide. He completed a Bachelor of Art (Visual Arts) at the University of South Australia in 1986 and began exhibiting widely across Australia. Through his work he is trying to create a tactile sense of form whilst searching for a way to integrate differing degrees and shifts of pictorial reality within the same image.
Daryl was included in the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1992. He has received numerous awards includng the EVA Award, Adelaide (1993), University of Adelaide – Vice Chancellor Portrait Commission [2003), Parliament of South Australia – President of Legislative Council Portrait commission (2005) and the State Library of South Australia, Portait commission (2019). He has won a number of art prizes including the Kernewek Lowender Art Prize (1993), Whyalla Art Prize (1997 and 2002), Victor Zhang Portrait Prize (2015) and the Heysen Prize for Landscape (2018). He has also been a finalist in other major prizes including the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in Sydney and the Black Swan Art Prize at the the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
Daryl’s work is collected by the Art Gallery of South Australia, the University of Adelaide and Legislative Council, Parliament of South Australia in addition to several corporate collections in Australia. He is currently represented by GAGPROJECTS (Greenaway Art Gallery) in Adelaide.
Daryl Austin (1) Instagram
Daryl Austin "Midwich" 2025, Shellac Ink on acetate film Image size 24 x 18 cm H x W