Sam Porritt
Sam Porritt (born 1979 in London, United Kingdom) is an attentive observer of everyday realities. With sensibility and a subtle sense of humor, he translates ambivalent impressions and perceptions into word plays, drawings, objects, and sculptural installations. These combine the artist’s two-fold interest in issues of construction, structure, and language as a concrete means to find forms on the one hand, and as a way to put social questions into perspective on the other.
After Porritt had worked primarily with sculpture and film in London in the late 1990s, drawing began to take up an independent position within his multimedia work in the mid-2000s. His enjoyment of the directness and spontaneity of this medium inspired him to create a multitude of small, abstract ink drawings in black and white that can be read as figurative and ask such questions as: What transforms a marking into a figure? When does a line take on meaning in the beholder’s eyes? And what is the role of the title? In a curly line resembling a spring Porritt found a “motif” as a basis for further examining the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, as well as language and writing. In “Going Forward” from 2010, for example, a curly horizontal line extends from the left side into the pictorial surface in reading direction, continuing undeterred beyond a supporting pedestal of equally curly, horizontally adjacent lines.
Recently, Porritt also combines his lines into complex patterns that move all over the entire surface of the picture, transforming it into a field of experimentation for the interplay between form and color. The repetitive, entangled forms in such medium to large-sized drawings as “Looking for Footing” (2013) and “Emperor’s New Clothes” (2016) are each rendered in three colors the artist has derived from the respective ornamental formal language, in recourse to modernist color theories, or everyday observations. The forms extend the gaze of the beholders in all directions, pulling them in, only to repel them again, unfolding a playful tension between abstraction and figuration, ornamentation and decoration. This is also the case in the latest work from this series, which is part of the collection of the Museum Haus Konstruktiv: “Figure Ground Problem Study” (2021). Here, intertwined wave-like patterns of red, blue, and yellow alternate between pressing forward and falling back, thereby illustrating a well-known problem in art history: the so-called figure-ground problem. Porritt addresses this “problem” with ease, transforming it into a casual, sketch-like exploration.
Sam Porritt studied sculpture at the Chelsea College of Art and Design (1999–2002) in London and earned a postgraduate degree from the Royal Academy Schools (2002–2005). He was nominated for the Swiss Art Award in 2017 and 2020.
Eliza Lips
After Porritt had worked primarily with sculpture and film in London in the late 1990s, drawing began to take up an independent position within his multimedia work in the mid-2000s. His enjoyment of the directness and spontaneity of this medium inspired him to create a multitude of small, abstract ink drawings in black and white that can be read as figurative and ask such questions as: What transforms a marking into a figure? When does a line take on meaning in the beholder’s eyes? And what is the role of the title? In a curly line resembling a spring Porritt found a “motif” as a basis for further examining the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, as well as language and writing. In “Going Forward” from 2010, for example, a curly horizontal line extends from the left side into the pictorial surface in reading direction, continuing undeterred beyond a supporting pedestal of equally curly, horizontally adjacent lines.
Recently, Porritt also combines his lines into complex patterns that move all over the entire surface of the picture, transforming it into a field of experimentation for the interplay between form and color. The repetitive, entangled forms in such medium to large-sized drawings as “Looking for Footing” (2013) and “Emperor’s New Clothes” (2016) are each rendered in three colors the artist has derived from the respective ornamental formal language, in recourse to modernist color theories, or everyday observations. The forms extend the gaze of the beholders in all directions, pulling them in, only to repel them again, unfolding a playful tension between abstraction and figuration, ornamentation and decoration. This is also the case in the latest work from this series, which is part of the collection of the Museum Haus Konstruktiv: “Figure Ground Problem Study” (2021). Here, intertwined wave-like patterns of red, blue, and yellow alternate between pressing forward and falling back, thereby illustrating a well-known problem in art history: the so-called figure-ground problem. Porritt addresses this “problem” with ease, transforming it into a casual, sketch-like exploration.
Sam Porritt studied sculpture at the Chelsea College of Art and Design (1999–2002) in London and earned a postgraduate degree from the Royal Academy Schools (2002–2005). He was nominated for the Swiss Art Award in 2017 and 2020.
Eliza Lips
Works by Sam Porritt
