Sammi Mak’s paintings on display at Unveil Exhibition, Club Row, London
A title of a painting can be descriptive, narrative, elusive or personal to the artist. The title of 2022 graduate Sammi Mak‘s recent work ‘Norwegian wood’– which prompted a discussion of the most translated contemporary Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami when it went on display this October – is not about directly representing the content of his novel of that name. The understanding of landscape at work in paintings by 2022 graduate Sammi Mak is looser, more expansive.
These spacious, aerial paintings set out to give states of feeling lost in translation, exhibiting, the artist states, a “sense of connection with the environment, inspired by a gesture of nature, and the syntax of human experience. It is an ecology of the senses.”
The titles of these paintings are bridges through the air: not necessarily leading anywhere tangible, but providing some footing in the abstraction. The painterly is foregrounded, the brushwork – all that it evokes – lightly deployed. Sometimes blank spaces will be left, suggesting there is more to be seen, felt or done: active participation is invited. In others the artist will paint all the way to the border, creating immersion. Take the molecular magnificence of ‘Mist’ or the substance of ‘Chaos’.
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