LONDON.- This autumn, the Institute of Contemporary Arts is staging the first major public exhibition by artist Enrico David. David will present work from the last five years, including paintings, works on paper, sculptures and vitrines as well as two large-scale installations – one of which is specially conceived for this show at the ICA.

Over the last decade, Enrico David, Italian by birth but based in London, has quietly established a reputation as one of Britain’s most original artists. This is the first exhibition that demonstrates ongoing strands within his work, which often features stylised figures staged within erotic or tragicomic scenarios.

David’s work borrows from craft techniques and modern design, and in the past the artist has employed textiles and embroidery in his work, as well as drawing on interior decoration. However in his practice craft and design are subject to both distortion and degradation. David’s interest in the languages of design (as well as those of painting and sculpture) reflects a broader dynamic in his work, such languages giving him “an opportunity to explore discontinuity, disruption and misuse – as part of my interest in personal adaptation.”

David’s exhibition at the ICA is in two distinct parts. The lower gallery will feature a themed selection of painting, sculpture and vitrines from the last five years, specifically chosen by the artist. The sculptures include Sodulater (2005), a totem or fetish made from copper and wood, as well as a new sculpture made from a draughtsman’s doll.

These dolls and effigies are a recurring feature in David’s work, and some of the figures introduced here will reappear elsewhere in the exhibition: the artist considers the group of works in the lower gallery as a kind of “casting session”.

The lower gallery will also feature a large painting, The History of the Fracturing of Hope (2004) and a group of twenty-three gouaches, Shitty Tantrum (200607), works which depict an array of characters in a series of tableaux.

David has often worked with performance and text, and his art can be interpreted as a form of theatre, reenactment or psychodrama: centring on episodes of trauma; shot through with desire, guilt and secrecy; and ultimately promoting the transformations of masquerade as an elaborate survival strategy. However, the work resists simple biographical readings, hovering instead between the specific and the archetypal.

The two upper galleries will each contain a single autonomous installation. The first of these is Spring Session Men (2003), originally created for the Project Arts Centre in Dublin. Running down one wall will be a seven-metre long multi-panel painting, mimicking a piece of Art Deco marquetry and featuring a frieze or chorus line of twelve sharply-tailored men. Framed embroideries on canvas and a hanging medallion complete the scene, together with a large conference table covered in memos – the latter featuring the logo of a fictional company. The work is a kind of boardroom, but one shot through with a suppressed, hysterical homoeroticism.

The second installation, created for the ICA, is in the form of a diorama. This scene, achieved through trompel’oeil effects, is based in part on a Surrealist photo-collage from 1935 by Dora Maar. The latter image features a paneled room, mud strewn across its floor, inhabited by a matronly figure and a young boy who appears to rub himself against her. In David’s version this image is combined with more personal material, as the room is crossed with a bedroom designed for the young David by his father in the early 1970s, and the figures are replaced by cut out images of a doll and of the artist himself.

Enrico David was born in Ancona, Italy, in 1966. He moved to London in the late 1980s, and studied fine art at Central St Martin’s in the early 1990s. David first became celebrated for a series of large-scale embroidered canvases, featured in a solo exhibition at The Approach, London (1999), and in the group exhibition New Labour, Saatchi Gallery, London (2001). However, 2001 marked a significant shift in David’s practice, which has subsequently employed a wider range of media, including a significant sculptural component.

David’s solo exhibitions include projects at Cabinet Gallery, London, and Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, as well as David, Project Art Centre, Dublin (2003), Douchethatdwarf, Transmission, Glasgow (2003) and Chicken Man Gong, Tate Britain, London and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2005 and 2007 respectively). His group exhibitions include The best book about pessimism I ever read, Kunstverein Braunschweig (2002), Clandestine, Venice Biennale (2003), Flesh at War with Enigma, Kunsthalle Basel (2004), British Art Show 6, Hayward Gallery, London and tour (2005), Tate Triennial 2006, Tate Britain, London (2006) and The Subversive Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Van Abbe Museum, Einhoven (2006).

The exhibition will be accompanied by an artist’s book, produced after the closure of the exhibition. David will also create a new limited edition work to accompany the exhibition, in association with Rococo Chocolates.