Self portrait (studying a painting), 60 x 76 cm, 2000
Daryl Austin: The Long View, Adelaide Town Hall, 12 August to 15 February 2027
Daryl Austin: The Long View (Fictive Portraits), The City of Adelaide Library, North Terrace, 28 July to 27 September 2026
Over the course of thirty years of his art practice, the paintings of artist Daryl Austin have evolved to encompass three distinct—but meaningfully related—genres of painting; still life, portraiture he characterises as fictive (2009–) and more recently, a renewal of interest in imagery associated with the urban landscape (2019–). Central to his project is a kaleidoscopic visual representation of the idiosyncrasies, the complexities of place – the place being Tarntanya, the city of Adelaide.
Far from indicating a creative restlessness, Austin’s shifts of focus constitute an organic progression that incorporates revisiting and reinterpreting aspects of his own archive. “I’ve found myself,” he states, “circling back to things with a different emphasis, a different handling, a different way of thinking about them.” In addition to two realist self-portraits, The Long View presents a selection of fictive portraiture and urban landscapes (2015–2026) from which Austin emerges as a gentle disrupter.
Disruptions #2 (evening), 2020, oil on panel, 60 x 76 cm
Image courtesy of the artist
Although in 2002 he had created a suite of hyper-realistic and richly hued, twilight paintings of Adelaide’s modernist buildings—constructed in the post-WWII boom period—in 2019 he began work on a series of inner-city sites and landscapes observed on his daily walks.1 Invariably unpeopled, Austin’s ongoing Disruptions position the city itself as protagonist in a significant genre shift that gained momentum during the pandemic years of the early 2020s – a period defined by uncannily vacated streets and public spaces.
In an echo of an earlier preoccupation with the reverse sides of paintings—a feature of the Still Point Studio Paintings (1998)—Austin elected to highlight the kind of civic spaces generally considered devoid of aesthetic appeal; the rear of buildings, car parks, charmless empty plazas, multi-storey, scaffolded buildings and the obtrusive heavy machinery and lifting equipment associated with major construction. It is also a city, as The Long View curator, Becca Freezer points out, in which “buildings and monuments remain in states of transition, a work in progress subject to shifting priorities, changing governments and perpetual revisions.”
Amplifying this sense of impermanence, painterly, mutable surfaces are awash with visual overlays and elusive traces or ‘shimmer marks’ that simultaneously imply a veiled presence within the image and gesture towards abstraction. An enhanced use of colour further differentiates the Disruptions series; notably there’s an infiltration of orange in the facades of buildings, safety bunting flags, bollards, or traffic cones. They assume, as Freezer states, “an unlikely pictorial relevance, becoming compositional anchors through which space is broken apart and reassembled.”
Covered monument, Tarntanyangga, 2026, 122 x 152 cm
Image courtesy of the artist
With a foregrounded grassy froth of indigenous Xanthorrhoea planting and receding vertical elements—goalposts, a straggle of eucalypts, a crane towering above the city skyline—#4 Pakapakanthi skyhook (2020) is a study in verticality. Unexpectedly, utilitarian black scaffolding mesh in Veiled Façade Tangkaira (2020) grants a paradoxical elegance to a multi-storey building under construction in Hindmarsh Square. Even in a city cluttered with construction and bristling with cranes and traffic lights, paintings such as Disruptions #2, (2020) with its lilac sky and the finely balanced composition of Covered Monument Tarntanyangga (2026), exemplify the surprising visual seduction of Austin’s urban landscapes.
Adelaide’s statuary gains fresh visibility, either through its shrouding, or its displacement—with characteristic wry humour—to Austin’s alternative locations. Against a background of colonial reckoning, the bronze statues of explorer Captain Charles Sturt (1795–1869) and South Australian Premier Charles Cameron Kingston (1850–1908)—unveiled in 1916 in Victoria Square/Tarntanyangga—seem to have migrated to a grassland in the southern parklands.2 And Adelaide’s earliest street statue, the life-sized Venere di Canova (Canova's Venus)—now wreathed in an otherworldly phosphorescence—makes a reappearance in Carriageway Park/Tuthangga; an area under regeneration with indigenous plants and grasses
Adelaide Gothic, 2023, 76 x 91 cm
Image courtesy of the artist
In the way that Austin’s ‘shimmer marks’ are intended as a disruption, “a way of slowing a viewer’s over-willing acceptance of representation”, allusions to ways of seeing and unseeing permeate his entire, assiduously plotted body of work. Expectations may at any time be subverted. Remarkably, the unprecedented life-sized scale and candid realism of Austin’s audacious Our Grace (2008) suite—of naked portraits of regulars from the storied Grace Emily Hotel—was followed in 2009 by a beguiling series of drawings with imagery sourced from vintage black and white photographs.
In retrospect, the tiny scale of Circa Europe’s charcoal and pencil drawings belied their generative impact, fuelling a further five solo exhibitions (2009–2026). Based on predominantly anonymous photographs—uncovered in antique shops, flea markets and the internet—the images shared a departure/arrival narrative associated with the knotty experiences of post-WWII emigration. Unusually, a cache of photographs of women, rehearsing in 1955 for Adelaide’s annual Christmas Pageant procession, provided a specific point of reference for the amusing Carnival (2024) and Pageant (2025) paintings. More than a murmur, it’s a period—within living memory—that pulses within Austin’s work, since in 1967 he and his family migrated to Adelaide from Lincolnshire in the United Kingdom.
Pageant, 2025, 46 x 61 cm
Image courtesy of the artist
For Outward Bound (2018), Austin went further, conjuring ingenious narratives for his series of ‘recent arrivals, travellers and voyagers’ – unmoored from their actual and mostly unknowable histories. The commanding presence of a stalwart, middle-aged woman—faithfully transcribed from its source in the seminal Circa Europa series—is especially striking. Attentive viewers may identify a background detail as the monumental bronze lions at the base of Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square – famously the site of several early twentieth-century militant actions by the suffragettes3 including the meat-cleaver assault by Mary Richardson (memorably nicknamed ‘Slasher Mary’) on Diego Velázquez’s The Toilet of Venus in the nearby National Gallery. For this reason, Austin has reframed his anonymous subject as a former suffragette, standing outside the National Gallery—proudly wearing a suffrage medal—honouring her colleague on the fiftieth anniversary of their activism. (Hence the mysterious title 10.03.64 of this work.)
10.03.64, from Austin’s Outward Bound series, 2018, 37.5 x 50 cm
Image courtesy of the artist
Cumulatively, this substantial and expansive body of work (2009–2023)—realised in a nostalgia-invoking, muted palette—functioned to cast doubt on the veracity of both the painted portrait and photography. Through a self-described process of nibbling and whittling, Austin reshapes the relationship between figure and ground, imaginatively supplying and reanimating his historical material with (mostly) fictional locations and inserting enigmas, such as the non-matching eye colours of each subject in the Fictions (2013) series.
The striking realism and piercing gaze of Austin’s two, identically framed self-portraits mark the passage of time (2000–2022), bracketing an evolving sequence of intentionally open-ended, non-prescriptive artworks. If we consider perception is an act of creation, dependant on multiple contextual factors, a degree of ‘leakage of meaning’4 is to be anticipated. From the outset, viewers have projected their own narratives onto the more enigmatic of his paintings – sometimes surprising Austin with their connection to the places and people or objects depicted. The sequential trajectory of Austin’s richly diverse practice—wherein aspects of his archive are revisited and reinterpreted—might be described as elliptical, or perhaps more pertinently, with its singular twist, a Möbius loop.
Wendy Walker
When: 12 August to 15 February 2027 (Adelaide Town Hall).
28 July to 28 September (City of Adelaide Library)
Where: The Adelaide Town Hall (@adelaidetownhall), King William St, Adelaide
The City of Adelaide Library, Level 1, North Terrace, Adelaide
More info: darylaustin.com
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Self portrait (studying a painting), 2022, 60 x 76 cm
NOTES
1. Daryl Austin moved into Adelaide’s CBD in the 1990s, where he also has his studio.
2. A proportion of Victoria Park/Pakapakanthi (Park 16) in the southern Park Lands is a protected biodiversity site with native grasslands and wildflower ecosystems. In total there are seven key diversity areas in the Park Lands.
Charles Cameron Kingston was premier of South Australia in 1894, when the passing of the Women’s Suffrage Bill granted women the right to vote and importantly, to stand for parliament (the first in Australia).
3. Mary Richardson was protesting the incarceration of Emmeline Pankhurst—founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union—who in 1908 delivered a rousing speech standing on the base of Nelson’s Column.
4. Leslie Dick, ‘Soft Talk: Thoughts on Critique’, X-tra, Contemporary Art Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 1, Fall, 2018
