artist profile
Sam Leach
born
1973
lives and works
Melbourne, Australia
education
BA, Adelaide University, Australia, 2003
MFA, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, 2005
about the artist
Sam Leach’s photorealist paintings proffer glimpses into his contrived cosmos where the laws of art, nature, and science are thrown into a spectacular entropy. Time, gravity, and even air seem to stand still in this dark space where wildlife intersects with corporate architecture, and landscape intertwines with cutting-edge technology. Drawing a deliberate influence from seventeenth-century Dutch painting, the artist reinvests the genre with contemporary pertinence to an effect of humorous disjuncture, sober surrealism, and romantic morbidity. Leach has received a number of awards, including the Wynne Prize and the Archibald Prize, both in 2010. He has also held solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions across Australia at spaces such as the Jewish Museum of Australia in Melbourne, the University of Queensland Art Museum in Brisbane, the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art also in Brisbane, and the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne.