Sam Leach: Platonia

About

Award winning Australian artist Sam Leach's first UK exhibition The juxtaposition of nature with technology has been the overriding inspiration in the most recent work from acclaimed Australian artist Sam Leach. With their omnipresent dark resin backdrop and often no bigger than a sheet of A4, Leach's visually-powerful paintings, in his now familiar style of allegorical 17th Century Dutch still life, have won him widespread recognition as well as a place at the forefront of contemporary Australian art. In May this year Sam Leach achieved the unprecedented ‘Double' win of Australia's most prestigious art prizes, The Art Gallery of New South Wales's Archibald Prize for Portraiture and the Wynne Prize for Landscape painting, becoming only the third artist to do so in its 90 year history. Leach's fascination with the 17th Century as the first prototype of a liberal capitalist society and the origins of our technological advancement, inspired him to create mesmerising still-life paintings of animals which interact, or combine with elements of technology.