About
The Approach is pleased to present a new body of work by the British painter Sam Windett. Windett's practice has developed from small paintings based on still life constructions, to mainly larger more painterly canvases suggesting views into spaces that lie somewhere between cities and landscapes, mechanical and organic.
The composition of the mostly monochromatic work is derived from the imagined sight line down a colonnaded path or corridor with a central light. Windett repeats the motif of a column and circle, prevalent in earlier work, which act as points of reference for the viewer to navigate the representational space within the paintings. The strips at the edges of the canvases may recall plant fronds or mechanical carwash brushes; they serve as a device to contain the void between, and to direct vision to the centre of the paintings. Elegant vertical lines and floating circles hint at the use of geometrical shapes in art deco design or early modern visions of the city. The tall and narrow format employed by Windett suggests a threshold, such as a window or doorway, to another place.
A depth is created in the works through layering of brushstrokes that gradually become opaque, revealing hand-made qualities and varying textures in the planes of paint. Each layer Windett adds purposefully obscures what was previously applied, obliterating sections of pictorial imagery in a series of risky moves made in order to build an atmospheric luminosity in each work, a fog-like haze that colours the mood of the spaces suggested beyond the surfaces of the paintings.
Sam Windett (b. 1977 in Kent, UK) lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include The Approach, London, UK (2011); Zephyr, Sies + Höke Galerie, Düsseldorf, Germany; Billion Watt Bulb, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, USA (2010). Group exhibitions include Pale Ontology, Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2012); OWL STRETCHING TIME, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin, Germany; Zipora Fried & Margarete Jakschik & Sam Windett, Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, St Louis, USA (2010); Jerwood Contemporary Painters, Jerwood Space, London, UK; âStudio Voltaire presents: â¦', BolteLang, Zurich, Switzerland (2009).
