Austin Osman Spare English artist and occultist Date of Birth: 30.12.1886 Country: Great Britain

Biography of Austin Osman Spare

Austin Osman Spare was an English artist and occultist who worked as a draftsman and painter. Influenced by symbolism and modernism, his paintings are characterized by clean lines, depictions of monsters, and sexual scenes. Practicing occultism, he invented magical techniques of automatic writing, automatic drawing, and sigil creation, based on the interaction between the conscious and unconscious aspects of the self.

Austin was born into a working-class family in London. He grew up in the Smithfield area and later in Kenningston, where he developed an interest in painting from an early age. He received a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington and then became acquainted with Aleister Crowley and his sect, Argentum Astrum. Spare developed his own occult philosophy and wrote several grimoires, including "Earth Inferno," "The Book of Pleasure," and "The Focus of Life."

He organized his own exhibitions and gained attention from the press in 1904, becoming the youngest participant in the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition. Austin Spare also published two short-lived art journals, "Form" and "The Folden Hind." During World War I, he was called into military service and worked as a war artist.

Over the following decades, Spare moved from one working-class neighborhood in London to another, living in poverty but continuing to exhibit his work with varying degrees of success. In the 1930s, with the arrival of surrealism in the London art scene, critics and the press began to show more interest in his paintings, considering him a precursor to surrealist art.

During the bombings in London, Spare lost his home, and after World War II, he fell into relative obscurity, although he continued to participate in exhibitions until his death. His esoteric practice was greatly supported by his friend, the thelemite Kenneth Grant. In the 1970s, there was a renewed interest in Austin Osman Spare's work during a resurgence of interest in modernism in Britain. Several retrospective exhibitions of his art were held in London. Books about Spare and his paintings have been written by authors such as Robert Ansell and Phil Baker.

In 1964, the Greenwich Gallery held an exhibition of Spare's works, accompanied by essays by critic Mario Amaya, who believed that the artist's depictions of celebrities were the "first example of pop art in the country." Furthermore, he stated that Spare's automatic drawing "predicted the emergence of abstract expressionism long before Jackson Pollock's name was heard in Britain." In terms of esotericism, one of the artist's favorite techniques was the use of sigils and the creation of a "alphabet of desire," which were later adapted and popularized by Peter Carroll in his book "Liber Null & Psychonaut." Carroll and several other authors are considered key figures in the development of some of Spare's ideas and techniques, which are now part of chaos magic.

The term "Zos Kia Cultus" was coined by Spare in collaboration with Kenneth Grant and has different meanings for different people. In one interpretation, it represents a form, style, and school of magic devised by Spare. It focuses on the inner world and the influence of the magician's will upon it. Currently, "Zos Kia Cultus" has very few followers and is considered a movement that has had the greatest influence on the development of chaos magic.