Sam King’s practice explores the human condition on an individual and social level. Distorting the body to reveal our suppressed desires and repulsions, his work disrupts constructed notions of identity in order to trigger a primordial reconnection with the self. The resulting work deals with universal concepts of creation and destruction, being and non-being, fullness and nothingness.
King employs the chiaroscuro techniques of the Old Masters aimed to inspire veneration and awe. Yet unlike their notion of spirituality, conveyed by a divinely inspired, biographically coherent subject, he denies this agenda, rupturing the soundness of the figure. The result is a work that locates the transcendent within the indeterminate and contingent forms of the body.