David Noonan

Since the early 2000s, London-based Australian artist David Noonan has gained global recognition for his idiosyncratic use of photography and found images. Although his affecting collages, sculptures, and paintings often appropriate disparate pictures—of people, places, and events—Noonan’s favored images are vintage depictions of costumed performers and members of utopian collectives. Noonan sources these aged, sepia-toned photographs from books, magazines, and film stills, and he later layers and combines them,  often silk screening them onto fabric, to striking cinematic effect. Ultimately, Noonan’s work is seeped in themes of memory, sentiment, and nostalgia, and his amalgamated photographs therefore quietly question accepted history while reworking these archival photographs into new and surreal visual stories.

Noonan has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, and Adelaide’s Centre for Contemporary Art. He has also been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including the Palais des Beaux Arts in Paris, the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, the Museum of Old and New and the Tasmanian Museum of Art Gallery in Tasmania, Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, Glasgow's Mitchell Library, Korea's Busan Biennial, and London’s Tate Britain, Zabludowicz Collection, and Tate Triennial.