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. 
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  • Lock’s artistic process is mysterious and untamed. The painted surfaces evolve overnight in a way that cannot be controlled or...
    Lock’s artistic process is mysterious and untamed. The painted surfaces evolve overnight in a way that cannot be controlled or anticipated. Paint soaks, cracks, and settles into the canvas; the artwork is not created, but becomes. The canvas is no longer the support, rather it becomes the painting itself. It is in this process of becoming that the paintings themselves move through the physical realm in an alchemical journey towards the metaphysical. The paintings in this exhibition are tangible, material, their objective reality cannot be denied. They can be seen, measured and found, yet they simultaneously point towards another reality. They provide a conceptual, imaginative space which is at once emotional and elusive. This is the tension in all things, held down and rooted physically by gravity but also hovering above the world as ideas and meanings in a language devoid of words.
     
    Throughout this exhibition, everything is at once connected yet in constant question. It is a story retold, reshaped, written again and again in a constant state of becoming. 
     
    Forever and fleeting.
    Fixed and flux.
    Connected and apart.
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