The Approach is pleased to present a solo presentation by London-based painter Sam Windett as part of CONDO New York 2018, hosted by Marinaro Gallery.
Themes of time, movement and repetition, partly taken from the artist’s memories of driving through the South West of England, resonate throughout the work. The feeling of travelling during ambivalent moments between day and night, dawn and dusk, becomes a permeating presence within a number of the paintings. Multiple layers of paint, charcoal and textured marks combining torn and cut paper intertwine, evoking broken landscapes caught in a hinterland between abstraction, narrative and representation. Physical and ephemeral aspects of road travel are at play in the work, from the scrambled black and white surfaces of the wet road to the static of a car radio and the surrounding darkness of a night drive. References to radio compound not only through painterly representations of white noise but in the dial-like forms within the paintings. The recurring motif of the disc doubles up both as suns and moons or the headlights of approaching cars. In the smaller canvases, cell structures resemble the veins of vascular leaves, plants or invented ribcages. Seemingly organic forms contradict their evolution from the motif of fragmented mechanical bodies in earlier paintings of aeroplanes or drones.
Sam Windett (b. 1977 in Kent, UK) lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions Include; Motorway IV, The Approach, London (2017); Sam Windett, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, USA (2015); THIS PANEL IS THAT PAINTING, The Approach, London, UK (2014); Billion Watt Bulb, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, USA (2010); Zephyr, Sies + Höke Galerie, Düsseldorf, Germany (2010). Group exhibitions include Imagine, Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy (2016); Background / Foreground, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, Sweden (2016); Modest Villa Immense Versailles, Kinman, London, UK (2016); The Grantchester Pottery paints the stage, Jerwood Space, London, UK (2015); Inside Arrangement, Mary Mary, Glasgow, UK (2014); IntersectionContemporary Abstraction And Figuration, Online Exhibition curated by Steve Gibson, The Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA, USA (2013).