Austin Osman Spare with Richard Brown: Objections to an Empty Mind

Although an influential figure within the occult community and championed by experimental musicians and writers including Coil, Barry Humphries, Alan Moore, Genesis P-Orridge, Jimmy Page and John Zorn, the London artist Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956) remains a liminal figure in British art history.

Trained at the Royal College of Art, Spare became a celebrity after exhibiting at the Royal Academy, aged 17, in 1904 and was hailed as an artistic genius early in his career. However, his occult leanings (he was briefly associated with notorious occultist Aleister Crowley) made popular success difficult for the awkward, inward-looking Spare, who became increasingly marginalised by the art establishment, before eventually dropping out of sight altogether.

The Hidden Noise brings together a small yet potent selection of works by Spare from several private collections, curated to bring to the fore his exquisite draughtsmanship (often likened to that of Albrecht Dürer), and to highlight his interests in occult traditions, psychical phenomena, Eastern philosophy, wireless broadcasting and his own idiosyncratic theories about the unconscious. Works include obsessively detailed phantoms and grotesques; symbolist and astral landscapes; automatic drawings; hallucinatory pastels; examples of Spare's anamorphic portraits (his ‘experiments in relativity’), as well as more traditional, vivid self-portraits and portraits of local cockneys.

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