Isak Austin as part of Materiality – a group exhibition exploring the quality or character of being material or composed of matter.

Created during a one-month residency at Muralverkstedet Lilleborg in Oslo, Austin’s series of fresco paintings explore the traditional technique in which pigment is absorbed into wet slaked lime.

Drawn from material permanence and historical connotation, Austin works within the mediums constraint, combining painted passages and carved marks. Once used due to frescos unforgiving nature, these marks are preserved as part of the image, anchoring the work in its material process. This fragmentation deliberately interrupts the narrative and echoes the natural erosion seen in old frescoes. Expressions remain ambivalent, introspective as much as observant. Symbols such as birds, halos, and wooden planks gesture toward allegory. Though they may seem emptied of meaning to the contemporary viewer, their historical weight and painterly treatment continue to suggest significance. The works materiality is not only technical in this case, it becomes a mode of perception, shaping both the work and the process behind it.

Isak Austin (b. 2001, Stockholm) is based in Oslo, where he studies at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Working primarily with painting, his practice investigates the boundary between surface and image, gesture and meaning. Recently, he has begun working with fresco, a technique he is now exhibiting for the first time. His sustained interest in pigment chemistry led to an academic exchange at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.