exhibitions

TOTAH David Austen The island 2026 Folio

TOTAH presents The island, an exhibition of recent works by London- based artist David Austen. Made predominantly following a stay at our residency in Pantelleria this past spring, The island will be on view July 5th through September 5th, 2026. This is Austen’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Similar to the storied history of Pantelleria itself, Austen’s iconography sustains a tension between elementality and complexity, between the weathering changes history inflicts on a place and the eternal forms that persist apart from all variation and decay. Many of the details that fill out Austen’s etchings, paintings, and text-based works derive from observational particulars gathered on the island itself—from the details of trees and brush inhabiting these pictures to the helicopters that hover along the coastline.

Yet The island is as much metaphor as history. When Austen depicts Edenic figures, he borrows from the human presence of traces left behind; and his trees are similarly the remakings of actual trees that grow on Pantelleria. But underlying all this is a process whereby tangible realities are gradually stripped of the context in which they first appeared, and are inserted into a new vision. The result is a paring down, almost to the point of minimalism, where certain things begin to resemble archetypes, while never entirely ceasing to be themselves.

In his series of fifteen etchings, the many cultural influences found on Pantelleria, ranging from the ancient—Phoenicians, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans—to far more modern influences, take hold across each work. While Austen’s pictures generally tend to be dominated by a single image or theme, here the felt implications of his subjects give way to something difficult to describe in language. Just as Austen’s stars, isolated figures, trees, flowers, sea horizons, and quasi-mystical fauna tend to exceed the edges of his pictures, so too do the associations they provoke exceed what is manifestly shown.

Whether figurative or descriptive, the notion of an island connotes a world apart: something disconnected from life, yet which also defines itself in terms of this disconnection. Throughout The island, Austen returns to this condition again and again, translating the lived realities of Pantelleria—its persons, flora, and the mythologies that haunt it.