Sam Lock: The Forest, The Flood, The Sky

This autumn, Cadogan Gallery presents ‘The forest, the flood, the sky’, a new solo exhibition by British artist Sam Lock. This will be the artist’s tenth solo exhibition with Cadogan and marks a significant moment in Lock’s journey with the gallery and as an artist. This new body of work further draws upon notions of time, memory and intangible states of being; it inhabits a space between the physical and the metaphysical - a realm of accumulation and transformation.

The exhibition takes its title from three archetypal landscapes, each evoking a different temporal state: the forest as memory, tangled and layered; the flood as the mutable now, ever-shifting and fluid; and the sky as a boundless, unknowable future. Though seemingly distinct, these spaces are deeply interconnected - just as each painting relates to the next. The forest is not of trees, but of thoughts - a dense canopy of recollections through which one navigates the self and the world. In this sense, memory is not static but growing, branching, reshaping - a living terrain. There is something Blakean about this lyrical cosmology - in the interplay between the earthliness of the title, and the abstraction of the paintings themselves. The paintings are both contextualised and enriched by these grounded poetics, and it is this tension, this contrast, that animates the works. 

These new paintings are meditations on presence and absence. They do not seek harmony - rather, they discover it (or resist it) through encounter. Like fragments of stories that only make sense in juxtaposition, they collide, converse, repel, and finally cohere. These are paintings that pulse with contradictions: they are prologues and conclusions, ruptures and resolutions, echoes of times that may have passed or are still to come. Each canvas is a pendulum swinging between the past and the present, matter and memory, rooted in the material yet hovering in the intangible. It is only once they are placed together in harmony that the artwork becomes whole.