Sam Lock

Selected Biographical Notes

Sam Lock trained at Edinburgh University and Art Collage, graduating with an MA in Fine Art Painting and MA in History of Art in 1997. Whilst at College he won a scholarship award to travel to Rome and explore his interest in the relationship between history, archaeology and the processes of painting, a preoccupation that has fired his work and continues to underpin his practice. Originally from London, he lived in Canada, trained in Edinburgh and now lives by the coast in Brighton.

Sam Lock describes his work, “My paintings are language, a flow of information; sometimes that information comes from the painting itself, other times from the onlooker. An interface between viewer and object that shifts and changes, as thoughts and responses rise and sink back into the painting. A sensory relationship built upon the act of Looking. My aim is to stretch out the moment when a painting is sensed physically and visually and to delay the speed at which it is captured or known. I want to slow down the way we look at paintings, so that the experience of looking becomes formed into a physical response. To create a tangle of thoughts and senses that change and shift, leading back and forth between both the painting and the onlooker. Change is a process not an event, there is a continual flow and movement around us and in us, a constant conversion of what is happening now into the past. These works are made in that space, their appearance is created by it and the way they communicate relies upon it. They are not made with a system or fixed process but through an energy that I build, organic and unscripted. Each painting follows its own path until there is a balance between presence and absence; where there are silences and hiding places that are both poetic and activating.”

“I am interested in things that communicate slowly and how I can slow down the viewers perception, to create paintings that don’t reveal themselves fully, all at once, that have complexity and hooks and clues. The act of painting is for me, a filling up and emptying of space and surface; traces and echoes exist in a palimpsest, a build-up of painted marks, layers and statements that conceal and reveal, where time becomes held in a concrete way and the painting achieves a physical weight and substance. These layers allow you to swim in and out of the painting, they lead back in time. Often below the word that is spoken is the thing known and unspoken and it is this territory I find interesting to explore. To try and find that language in painting where underneath what is said, another thing is being said or suggested. The works physical presence is an intrigue, sparking unplanned journeys through a painted space, drawn by the attractions of the terrain and what is encountered there. Each painting creates a situation and is looking to hold a gaze and an imagination to capture.”

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2020

“Presence of Absence, Lemon Street Gallery, Truro, UK
“Aspect” Solo presentation Kunst Rai Amsterdam, Twelve Twelve Gallery

2018

“Unremembered” Solo Show, Twelve Twelve Gallery, Den Haag NL
“In situ” Solo Exhibition, & Gallery, Edinburgh
Solo Exhibition, Cadogan Contemporary, London

2017

“Presence” Solo Show, Twelve Twelve Gallery Den Haag NL
Solo Show, Wimbledon Fine Art, London
Solo Show, Cadogan Contemporary, London

2016

“Liminal Space”, Solo Show, Twelve Twelve Gallery, Den Haag NL
Solo Show, Wimbledon Fine Art, London
Discoveries, Temporary Gallery, Hove

2013

“Trace Element” Solo Show, Studio 226 Chelsea Design Centre, London

GROUP SHOWS

2020

London Art Fair, Lemon Street Gallery “Juxtaposition” Galerie Biesenbach, Cologne

2018

“Connection” &Gallery, Edinburgh
Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, London

2017

Art the Hague, Twelve Twelve Gallery, Den Haag
Inaugural Exhibition, Anne Neilson Fine Art, USA

2016

Art at Home, Jenna Burlingham Fine Art, London

2015

Drawn, RWA, Britsol

2013

32 Paintings, Phoenix Gallery, Brighton