Artist Enrico David: ‘It’s not a given you’re going to be relevant in your time’

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On the table between Enrico David and me, the sun bounces off a bowl of iridescent strawberries and Josef Koudelka’s Exiles. The book is open at an image taken at a psychiatric hospital in Palermo, Sicily, in 1985. In the lugubrious black and white image, several solitary figures try to avoid the heat in various ways, forming a strange and melancholy composition. Two men in the foreground lie despondent on the ground. “I seem to keep returning to it,” David muses, in his east-London-inflected Italian cadence.

We are sitting in one of the artist’s two London studios; this one, in Bethnal Green, is joined to his home. The sound of water trickling in the background comes from a new sculpture — specifically it comes out of the mouth of a small figure, prostrate on a pleated structure in wood and resin patinated with bronze and copper, titled “Le Bave (Solar Anus)” (2023). Behind David is another new, flat-looking sculpture, the complementary “Dame a L’Éponge” (2023). She protrudes into space with copper-plated steel limbs, clumsy and uncertain, a prong bearing forth the titular sponge.

That figure’s awkward off-kilterness and gawkiness have become recognisable characteristics in David’s sculptural work, where human-ish bodies are squashed, shrunk, squeezed — made to appear misshapen and uncomfortable, as if embarrassed by the mere association with being a person. “I feel they’re there to see me getting out of the scene — they’re witnessing my demise as a person, as a body, getting old, dying — there to gradually replace me.”

The day after we meet, “Le Bave” and the “Sponge Lady” are going to Berlin to be installed, with 14 other David sculptures, at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art for the artist’s exhibition Destroyed Men Come and Go. David has approached the show — devoted to free and floor-standing sculptures he has made in the past 10 years — as a diorama, treating the whole space as a story “that as a viewer you find yourself part of”. In reference to Koudelka’s photograph and to burial sites such as Milan’s Monumental Cemetery, with its sculptural tombs designed by Italian modern masters including Lucio Fontana and Gio Ponti, the exhibition reflects David’s ideas about the connection between art and mortality, and the way “sculpture is a form of memorial, effigies of who is no longer. In more than one way it indicates where we end.”

The funereal atmosphere is underpinned by the exhibition’s title — a line taken from Maurice Blanchot’s 1980 book The Writing of the Disaster, a reflection on grief, anger and terror and the impossibility of finding a language for cataclysmic loss. David scribbled the phrase in a sketchbook years ago and recently rediscovered it. The sculptures on show at KW “seem to express a condition of reluctance or surrender, sometimes exasperation. They give themselves over, they wait.”

Born in 1966, David grew up in Ancona, his early life punctuated by the political violence of the anni di piombo (the years of lead), such as the assassination of prime minister Aldo Moro, and by his father’s death when the artist was 17. Home provided a “fertile environment” for creative exploration, from commedia dell’arte and carnival to arranging Nativity scenes crafted from crumpled paper. Archetypal figures drawn from these Italian traditions, such as the Pulcinella or La Signora, can be traced in David’s untraditional sculpted figures, but they also refer specifically to the artist’s own life. “You have to find a way to use history, to confront it: how do you use the luggage of information that precedes you, to find a way to make it work for you?”

Since 1986, when David first came to the UK, most of his work has been made here. But his career has followed a non-linear progression, despite intermittent institutional exhibitions, including a 2018-19 survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, as well as his inclusion in the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

“My art practice was so irrelevant and out of sync with the current trends it allowed for total invisibility. This in turn provided me a way to maintain authenticity. Very few people connected with it, but I could be totally honest with what I was trying to do. You have to accept it’s not a given you’re going to be relevant in your time.”

Does he feel he is any more relevant now? “Absolutely not!” He laughs riotously, but concedes that “getting older gives you the authority and the understanding to stand next to a work that, say, 30 years ago would have been emotionally much harder to do. Making art is a matter of space as much as of time.”

The physicality of David’s sculpture has become a vocabulary: sponges, soil and shells all find their way into the works on show at KW, with more conventional materials such as jesmonite and bronze used in unconventional ways, to look elastic or flimsy. There are unexpected quotidian references — eardrums in “Usher me bye bye” (2022), municipal flower displays in “Self-portrait as a Town Planter” (2023). “It’s all there for the taking!” David says.

An element of surprise is a fundamental feature of a David sculpture. “Somehow you don’t even have to like the work — it’s whether it delivers you a certain effect.” It is easy to see these as objects of ridicule, but “I see humour as a manifestation or sublimation of rage, of protest.” Asked what makes him angry, David erupts with laughter again. Then he pauses. “Sometimes, anger is a way to express that thing you can barely give a name to — but God knows where that primal sense of sadness, of injustice, of lacking or longing comes from.

“We all have this dilemma: how do we fit in?” he continues. “In my case, the world is more habitable thanks to this” — he gestures towards the Sponge Lady standing guard behind him. “I feel I can be here with a higher degree of legitimacy, safety even, because I bring these things here; I can face the existential awkwardness of being here.”

‘Destroyed Men Come and Go’ runs to August 20, kw-berlin.de