David Austen: Good Timing (2014)

Collaboration with artist David Austen on the curation of The Nakeds (2014), an experience Blackshaw wrote about in the article ‘Good Timing’ (2014), a title which refers to their unexpected meeting and to Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing (1980), the psychological thriller set in Cold War Vienna which Austen used as one of his many unexpected portals into the exhibition. Their conversations on Egon Schiele, the modernist nude, contemporary figuration, the sexual politics of the gaze and the practice of watercolour - Austen’s preferred medium for his life studies - are ongoing and continue to inform Blackshaw’s thinking.