David Osbaldeston

“Straddling media and themes, the ‘Word Props’ of David Osbaldeston (b.1968) often resemble blown-up, dot-matrix newsprint images showing painted strips or crumples of card. Usually presented in pairs, they are captioned with words that indicate power relationships or contrasting roles and modes across various spheres of culture, theory and life: WRITER/EDITOR, BELIEVER/SCEPTIC, ME/YOU, US/THEM, INNOCENT/GUILTY. The Word Props have been at the centre of Osbaldeston’s practice for the past five years, forming the basis of A Pastiche of Different Techniques at Moon Grove, Manchester, in 2022–23, followed by a solo exhibition of the same name at Glasgow Print Studio in 2024 and a publication by Slimvolume in 2025. They also serve as a suitable point of entry to the artist’s wider practice, synthesising as they do many of the concerns that have occupied him since his first solo exhibition, at Matt’s Gallery, London, in 2006: the presentation of language as image, and of image as language; the unbinding and interrogation of the grammatical games by which value, taste and ethics are constructed in cultural discourse; the deeper political and economic backdrops to such dynamics; and, perhaps most importantly, an ongoing and productive splicing of media, producing moments of transcendent humour, surprise and provocation.”