David Musgrave (b.1973, Stockton-on-Tees, England) lives and works in London. His practice is an exploration of the uncertainties of representation, expression and process. The anthropomorphic forms that structure his work are at once figures and abstractions; a carefully nuanced interrelationship of image and material results in a play between the actual and the fictional, identification and estrangement. His sculptural works frequently involve depictions of common materials, such as scraps of paper rendered in painted aluminum sheet, which are modified and transformed by making their methods of construction explicit. His drawings can resemble documents of artifacts that hint at the primitive or the paranormal, although the exact nature of these non-existent objects remains unfixed. Other drawings replicate scored and damaged surfaces, close viewing of which reveals a highly detailed evocation of fictive but perfectly plausible surfaces created with graphite. Elusive imagery combines with the artist's technical precision to imbue the work with complex tensions, testing our notions of perception and the real.

Musgrave has exhibited extensively, most recently at The Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis. He has had solo shows at greengrassi, London as well as Marc Foxx, Los Angeles and Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow. In 2003 he was featured in Art Now, Tate Britain, London. He curated the exhibitions Waste Material, at The Drawing Room, London, and Living Dust, Norwich Gallery, Norwich. He currently teaches at Chelsea College of Art and Design.

Musgrave's work was first exhibited at Luhring Augustine in 2007 during Counterfacture, a group show of British artists that also included William Daniels, Rupert Norfolk, and Alex Pollard.

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