Biography
Sam King (b. 1995, Manchester, UK) is a British/Australian artist, living and working in London. Originally from South West UK, he developed an early practice based in street art and graffiti, which he pursued during a year living in Melbourne, Australia. Upon his return to the UK, he studied Fine Art at the Art Academy London, an atelier style school where he developed his oil painting techniques. Later, he completed a year at Turps Art School, going on to exhibit his work globally.
His most recent exhibitions include ‘The Future of Loneliness’, Guts Gallery, Curated by Maria Dolfini, London; ‘Don’t Ask a Fish What Water Is’, Palazzo Monti, Brescia, curated by Edoardo Monti; & ‘Imaginarium’, Public Service Gallery, Stockholm, curated by Silvana Lagos.
He is now currently completing his Masters at The Royal College of Art, London.
Artist Statement
My work explores the disorienting experience of living in a media-saturated world. Inspired by Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle—a society dominated by images and appearances, our consumption of digital content takes on a sublime, almost religious quality, reducing purpose to feeding market forces with our attention.
Over the past year, I’ve incorporated a pointillist technique influenced by Impressionists like Seurat who sought to capture light, dissolving the picture plane into an innumerable number of glistening points of light, capturing the spectacle of a new modernist world.
I aim this technique at our post-modern digitised environment. The paintings are appear to be made up of light, pulsating, scintillating, appearing to disintegrate the structure of the image, and with it its readability and meaning. Drawing upon heterogeneous references from art history, computer-generated software, internet imagery and personal photography, the works present an interplay in which the image and process both fight for attention, the image appearing to be simultaneously made and unmade by these shimmering nodes. The process itself becomes the spectacle, concealing any underlying reality with a dazzling facade, reflecting how we live in a state of distraction and passive consumption. The real world is overshadowed by a constructed fantasy.
My paintings address our submersion within endless stream of screen-based images, evoking sensations of hypnosis, hedonism, and superficial pleasure. Strange animals such as smiling dolphins populate my works, creatures that invite human interaction yet remain emotionally elusive, revealing the alienation underpinning our relationship with images. Symbols like disco balls and retrofuturist motifs reflect nostalgic visions of "what could have been," exposing a repetitive cycle that endlessly recycles the past. This circular logic of time—numbing and self-reinforcing—erases agency and authenticity, trapping us in an inescapable conveyor belt of market-driven repetition.
Oscillating from physical sketch to 3D computer graphic, and re-interpreted back into paint, my practice explores repetition as a defining concept of late-capitalist society. It is the process through which images lose their original meaning, instead becoming simulacra - inauthentic copies without originals. While part of my process embraces technological modes of production and aesthetics, intentionally undermining the notion of an artwork's essence as discussed in Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”, other parts strive to reinforce its tangible "made-ness." The presence of human touch, brushstrokes, and organic physical processes disrupt the cold sterility of mass reproduction. The result is an artwork that works to continually subvert and reveal its own beingness.
The spectacle is the process by which we cannot see: my paintings attempt to unveil this illusion. the ideology of representational painting, that it is ‘a window into a world’, is instead dissolved into sensations of colour, light: their ‘meaning’ becomes diffuse, or even lost. Flatness and depth interplay both literally – representational elements disintegrate into abstraction– and metaphorically – authenticity and superficiality intertwine.
CV
Education.
Royal College of Art 2024-2025
Turps Off Site Course 2021-2022
The Art Academy, Fine Art Diploma, 2015-2018
Selected Solo exhibitions.
2024 – Don’t Ask a Fish What Water Is, Curated by Edoardo Monti, Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy
2023 – Seeing is Believing, Eve Leibe Gallery, London
2022 - Will We Meet Again, Brushes with Greatness, London My Whole World, The Artist Contemporary Atelier, Online
Selected Group exhibitions.
2024 – The Future of Loneliness, Guts Gallery, Curated by Maria Dolfini, London
2023 – Imaginarium, Public Service Gallery, Curated by Silvana Lagos, Stockholm Between The Bridge And The Door, Pictorum Gallery,London Cacotopia, Annka Kultys Gallery, London
2022 – Fever Dream, Vortic (Online Exhibition) Curated by Daria Borisova (also displayed at Santa Monica Art Museum) Water is Not for Sale, Bloom Galerie, St Tropez Touchwood, Eve Leibe Gallery Hosted by Prior Art Space, Berlin Soho Revue x The Little Scarlet Door, London. Voices for Love, Prior Art Space, Barcelona Turps Off Site Leavers Show, Thames Side Gallery, London. Together/Somewhere, Visionary Projects x ArtCityWorks, Online #1 Exhibition, ArtsinSqaure, Online
2021 – London Design Week, The Bottle Factory, London Pulp, The Florence Trust, London Rea Fair, Milan, Italy
Residencies.
2024 – Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy
2022 – Pictorum Gallery Residency, London Eve Leibe Project, London
2020 – PADA studios, Lisbon, Portugal
2019 – Art House Holland, Leiden, Netherlands Auc Art Lab Residency, London, United Kingdom
2017- Jardin Orange Artist Residency, Shenzhen, China