Sam Austen is a London-based artist working in 16mm film, drawing, sculpture, etching and sound.
Austen makes work about what images do to us — how they lodge, dissolve, return. Working across film, drawing, etching, sculpture, and text, his practice is built around the tension between the physical and the hallucinatory, the fixed and the unstable.
His 16mm films layer studio-built objects, materials, and text into dense, multi-visual experiences. Using in-camera special effects images accumulate and transform through the physical process of their making, resisting easy resolution. The films draw on early animated cinema, graphic novels, horror, and science fiction as emotional and formal territories.
The drawings, etchings, and prints operate in the same territory through different means. Working with ink, etchings, and analogue processes with scanners and photocopy machines, Austen builds surfaces where bodies, plant-life, animals, landscapes, and architectures emerge and dissolve — images that invite the eye in and then refuse to settle. The drawings work in parallel to the films, they are a ground for them, and a reflection on substance, sequence, and the film frame expanded. Text runs through all of the work, both film and drawing, and is treated as object. Words, phrases and fragments carry their own weight within the visual.
Austen studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design and the Royal Academy Schools, and lives and works in London.
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Sam Austen
Born 1986, London, UK
Lives and works in London
Education
2014-2017 – Postgraduate Diploma Fine Art, Royal Academy Schools, London, UK
2006 – 2009 – BA (Hons) Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art, London, UK
2008 – Erasmus Exchange, Wießensee Kunsthocschule, Berlin, DE
Solo and Two Person Exhibitions
2021
• Sentient Summer – with Fani Parali, Sundy, London, UK
2018
• Hologram Burnt On To The Retina, Farbvision, Berlin, DE
2017
• Run!! For The Present, Deptford X Festival, Lewisham Art House, London, UK
• Somehow Eaten In The Dark, SET Space, London, UK
2014
• A Cool Drink To Cheek – with Fani Parali, Plaza Plaza, London, UK
• Such Animals, Paradise Row, London, UK
2010
• Angry Film, The Sunday Painter, London, UK
2009
• A Mouth To Suck Your Sap – with Alex Rathbone, The Sunday Painter, Bold Tendencies III, London, UK
Group Exhibitions
2021
• Drawing Biennial 2021, Drawing Room, London, UK
2019
• Greetings, Mauve, Vienna, AU
• B, Belmacz, London, UK
• Image Drum, Royal Academy, London, UK
• Out of Eye, Laure Genillard, London, UK
• Drawing Biennial 2019, Drawing Room, London, UK
2018
• New Work II: Material, The Cob Gallery, London, UK
• Chumming, The Pipe Factory, Glasgow, UK
2017
• Like Honey From A Weed, Cass Sculpture Foundation, West Sussex, UK
• Pressing Inertia, Enclave Lab, London, UK
• Bearing Liability, Strange Cargo, Folkestone, UK
• Royal Academy Schools Show 2017, Royal Academy Schools, London, UK
• At Last, So It Goes, Turf Projects, Croydon, UK
• Drawing Biennial 2017, The Drawing Room, London, UK
2016
• Sam Austen, Marte Eknaes, Andrew Mealor, Laure Genillard, London, UK
• Premiums Interim Projects, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK
2015
• Let’s Get Inside Everything, MilMa, London, UK
• Tara Has No Rooms Inside, Fountayne Road, London, UK
• Drawing Biennial 2015, The Drawing Room, London, UK
2014
• Tomb, Shrine, Survey-marker, Spare part, Enclave, London, UK
• Dreamland, Garis & Hahn, New York, NY, USA
2013
• Action! Moving Image Abstraction, Soho House, Miami, FL, USA
• Open Heart Surgery, The Moving Museum, London, UK
• Obscured Exchange, APT Gallery, London, UK
• The Instability of the Image, Paradise Row, London, UK
• V22 Collection Show, V22, London, UK
• Drawing Biennial 2013, Drawing Room, London, UK
2012
• Young London, V22, London, UK
• You Aren’t Anything, You Are Everything, The Duchy, Glasgow, UK
2011
• Seconds, The Sunday Painter, London, UK
• TVOD, Transition Gallery, London, UK
2010
• Land Without A Map, Affordable Art Fair, Battersea Park London, UK
• Film / Video / Performance – Wimbledon College of Art, London, UK
2009
• Memory Evaporate, The Trafalgar Hotel, London, UK
• Chelsea College of Art & Design Undergraduate Degree Show, Chelsea College of Art, London, UK
• Moistworks, Hold & Freight Gallery, London, UK
2008
• Black as a Hand in an Evening Glove, Tannery Arts, London, UK
2007
• Black Special, Job Centre, Putney Bridge Road, London, UK
Fairs
2019
• Draw Art Fair, Cob Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK
2018
• Loop, Cob Gallery, Barcelona, ESP
Awards
2009 – ACME Studio Prize Chelsea – 6 month studio award courtesy of ACME studios
CONTACT:
info@samausten.co.uk