Augustine Carr: Summa Theologica

No 20 is excited to announce its first solo exhibition with emerging artist Augustine Carr, who graduated with a sell-out show from the Royal College of Art in Painting in June 2016. His photographs were the first prints to be selected for the Royal College of Arts Painting collection, a collection of works designed to represent significant development in British painting.

“The work of Augustine Carr crosses several registers, combining painting, sculpture, print, photography, digital scanning and film.

An appropriated book cover is painted over, not so much defaced as embellished, and then it is scanned and printed at a much-enlarged scale. His work ‘Things to Make’ depicts a few trees painted in a free and simple manner. The book it is painted on, referred to in the title, is the classic book for children, and it underlines the childish nature of the painting. But there is more than just childish irreverence at play however, as the enlargement works to both distance us from the emotive painted book and to bring us closer to it through its enlargement. The device is both undone and magnified, as is the emotional intimacy

His work ‘Summa Theologica’ works in a similar way, but involves a small hand-modelled plasticine sculpture enlarged and reproduced by detailed CNC milling. Again, what appears as a small child-like sketch is enlarged and reproduced with a technical precision that it amplifies the haptic quality of the object and places it in a space of intimate virtuality.

Augustine Carr also makes films, involving his sculpture and shifts of scale. His ‘Investment for Economy’ involves a hearse driving an enlarged life-size reproduction of a set of hand-modelled castle crenellations. The object and the performed action are doubly over-blown and yet with the distance of the film medium, the elegy to what might be an embattled childhood is given poignancy.” 

Dr William Horner RCA PHD