Two new screenprints for DCA Editions (2019)

La Peste, 2019 & A Clockwork Orange, 2019

Screen print on Somerset Satin 300gsm paper

76 x 112cm

Edition of 20

Price: £540

David Austen La Peste finalDavid Austen A Clockwork Orange final

About the editions

A Clockwork Orange

This screen print was created in DCA Print Studio as part of our DCA Editions programme to coincide with David Austen’s exhibition Underworld in DCA galleries.

“My work explores love and yearning, loss and grief, memory and dream and the unreliability of these things. I make my work with exactitude and attention; it’s what the world deserves.”
David Austen

With sources as varied as 19th century literature, poetry, ancient myth and film noir, the impetus of Austen’s work often derives from his immediate surroundings. There is a liveliness and generosity in his approach to art making, a delicacy of touch, a delight in the unexpected, and a disarmingly nuanced understanding of complex human emotions.

With A Clockwork Orange, Austen has created a print using text from a found script of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, which he came across in the library archive of Kingston School of Art. The scene describes the moments in which Alex is subjected to a series of violent film imagery during a drug-induced nausea in attempt to re-condition him into a life of non-violence.

 (Alex: (Voice Over) from the script of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, p35)

…It’s funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen.

More

Kicks

Punches

Groans

Thumps

Once removed from the film script, the apparent meaning of the words changes depending on the accompanying story or context. Enlarged and seemingly weighty within the page, the words are reminiscent of The Dandy or Batman: comic violence – descriptive of, but removed from, real life actions.

La Peste

In ‘La Peste’, Austen creates a point of entry into the realm of Albert Camus’ philosophical novel The Plague about a society under siege of an epidemic echoing the underlying threat of fascism. Taking words derived from a final paragraph:…it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it roused up its rats again and sent them forth to die in a happy city. 

Albert Camus, The Plague, 194

Albert Camus, The Plague, 194

Using these lines, Austen repositions the text into what might be a new beginning of the novel; ‘IT BEGAN IN A HAPPY CITY,’ creating a cyclical narrative of events. Floating on the paper’s surface with punctuation and context removed, but rendered larger-than-life with the textured edge of each letter, and graphic contrast of black and white highly visible – these politically charged words resonate on many levels, the proximity of darkness and light hinting at something lying just below the surface, ready to re-surge.