David Musgrave

Biography

Lambda, a work of speculative fiction set in an alternate contemporary world, was published in 2022 by Europa Editions. Described by Lisa Tuttle in The Guardian as 'literary SF at its best', it was both a Wired and Sunday Times book of the year.

The Sad Life and Happy Death of Paper Napkin Holder Bear is a short film that uses an array of analogue and digital animation techniques to decribe the final minutes of a sentient object. It premiered at the Camden Art Centre in November 2024.

Co-organiser (with John Douglas Millar) of The Exploded Map, an evening of talks and films to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Thomas Pynchon's still highly relevant 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow. The event was commissioned by Susan Finlay for a.p. bookstore in Berlin, and featured contributions from Tom McCarthy, Sung Tieu, Duncan Marquiss and Joanna Freer.

Solo exhibitions include greengrassi, London, 2024 and 2018, Luhring Augustine, New York, 2014 and 2008, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, 2011, and Tate Britain, 2003. Group exhibitions include New Ground, MoMA, New York, 2023; Slow Looking, Tate Britain, 2013; Tracing the Century, 2013, Tate Liverpool and mima, Middlesbrough; and The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, curated by Mark Leckey, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, Nottingham Contemporary, and De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill-on-Sea, 2013. His animated film Studio golem was broadcast on Channel 4 in January 2013 as part of the Random Acts strand. He is feaured in institutional and private collections around the world, including MoMA, Tate and Arts Council England.

Musgrave's most recent work encompasses drawing, AI-assisted photography, moving image and the novel. All of his work concisely embodies the possibilities of expression and representation, the peculiar relationships between images and things, and art's potential for making and remaking worlds. Musgrave has an open yet critical position in relation to recent developments in AI, and continues to explore its ongoing challenge to what we understand as essentially human.