SAM JACKSON: 'Vas Deferens' - Private View December 10th 6.30pm

Exhibition Dates

Friday December 11th 2009 – Saturday January 23rd 2010
(Please contact the gallery for Christmas & New Year opening times)

Gallery Hours
Wednesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm or by appointment

“In my view, one of the likely agents of change is an artist called Sam Jackson. What does he do? He paints. Worse still, he often paints very small. I can’t think of a more revolutionary combination in London right now."
Edward Lucie-Smith

Jackson’s predominantly small to miniature paintings operate between several axes of investigation. Whilst recalling Old Master works in tone and atmosphere, they embody the contemporary by way of transgressive subject matter and stark, psychological intensity. Form and line vie and give way to disrupt and obfuscate the image as we are led beyond surface to a place of instinctive violence, impulsive sexuality and unsteady psychological bearing.

By continuing to make paintings that can still violate our sensibilities even in a time of unrepentant exposure to violent and sexual imagery, Jackson embraces tension and taboo, and simultaneously forces and seduces his audience to assimilate the erotic, pornographic and at times abject. These visceral, excessive works are, however, offset by moments of quietude defined by contemplative still lifes and portraits that oscillate between the reverential and the neurotic.

Jackson’s studio practice is unrelenting, analogous to a form of free association where found images, mental images and memories combine to create manifest and latent content in the works themselves. At once obsessive, fetishist and beautiful, the paintings reveal both destructive and life affirming drives whilst becoming sublimating mechanisms for both artist and audience.

Sam Jackson graduated in 2007 from the Royal Academy Schools in London and achieved instant recognition by going into the collections of Sir Norman Rosenthal, Kay Saatchi and David Roberts. Since then he has gone on to exhibit in Berlin, Frankfurt, Krakow, Los Angeles, Napoli, New York and Rome; and most recently has been curated into ‘British Art Now’ by Edward Lucie-Smith.