Dominic Samsworth at Supplement

Artist: Dominic Samsworth

Exhibition title: Return to Trash Island

Venue: Supplement, London, UK

Date: November 18, 2017 – January 6, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Supplement, London

Supplement is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in London by Dominic Samsworth. Samsworth works across painting, sculpture and installation. His past exhibitions have challenged and critiqued the gallery as a ‘leisure environment’, exploring the idea of the gallery as a symptom of the extravagances and excess of consumer lifestyle. For the exhibition Samsworth has created an installation that spreads across the entirety of the floor accompanied by two large wall works.

Samsworth’s paintings are large, bold, monochromatic works on shaped canvas that are rendered in aqua blues and greens, sun bleached yellows and oranges or faded pastel pinks. He uses industrial paints, ranging from rubber pool coatings to single stage automotive finishes. Their rich pigment, glossy lustre and flexibility are utilised to create a highly polished finish of the painted surface. His paintings relate to minimalism and post-painterly abstraction, retaining the austerity and material formalities of abstract and colour field painting whilst incorporating the language of product and architectural design. For Samsworth, eliminating distraction and reducing painting to a few key elements – form, colour, surface – is essential.

In an on-going series of paintings known as the ‘Pool Paintings’ Samsworth has appropriated catalogue designs of domestic swimming pools, shaping the canvas and its composition to follow the pool’s design. His shaped canvases move into the territory of sculpture, with shape and form dictating the overall image. Despite the paintings’ highly polished surfaces the raw canvas itself remains a persistent presence, as a reminder of their material nature and Samsworth’s commitment to the medium.

Samsworth has further explored this by displaying his canvases on the floor of the gallery, leaning against the wall, situating the work between painting and sculpture. Samsworth’s ‘Parasol Paintings’, displayed as part of the wall installation in the exhibition mimic the two-dimensional rendering of three-dimensional objects, flatting their forms in perspective. Here the ‘Parasol Paintings’ pull away from abstraction to become a representational image of the object itself, in both form and content. The paintings are set upon a band of ‘blue-back’ paper that runs the length of the gallery walls, suggesting a horizon line. The paper is the type used for advertisement billboards, to block out an underlying image for the next advert to be displayed.

Across the gallery’s floor is an installation made from an array of sea plastics, the pale, sun-bleached waste of capitalism. Sculptural arrangements of objects and materials can be found within the mass of materials, the assemblages drawing attention to the contrast between idealised images of luxurious beach resorts and the precariousness of global coastlines, sites of disaster wrought by a changing climate that is the result of consumer culture.