Sam Anderson at Derosia, New York

A series of bar-shaped sculptures populates Derosia’s main gallery. Each is coarse and condensed, featuring figures embedded in their architecture. Some hold red, green, or blue light, creating an RGB landscape of private monologues; a psychic space where grief, joy, and loneliness cross paths.

The sculptures consider a handful of literary sources set in bars. An intoxicated Miss Lonelyhearts (Nathaniel West) answers letters from the desperate and disillusioned. A saloon full of dead-end alcoholics drift purposelessly from day to day in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. “The Angel of Loneliness” visits a failed country singer in between sips of his beer in Robert Ashley’s Dust. Despite many references to the theater, Anderson’s sculptures remain static objects activated by the viewer who must consider them against their own subjectivity.

In a separate series installed in the gallery’s back room, three wall works house figures constructing taxi cabs from various materials. The figures stitch together a Frankensteined stand-in for the father, and while the taxi is the object of focus, the impulse to repair something internally is the subject. In her poem “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath calls hers a “bag full of God.” Here the model hardens where Pygmalion’s came alive.

Sam Anderson (b. Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in New York, NY. She received her MFA in sculpture from Yale in 2010. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include There’s a Girl In My Soup, Art Hall, Baltimore, MD (2025); Network, Playworkshop, Naples, Italy (2025); Where’s Poppa?, Derosia, New York, NY (2025); Lunch Hour, Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Sam Anderson, The Gaylord Apartments, Los Angeles, CA (2022); I Never Loved Your Mind, Tanya Leighton, Berlin, Germany (2020); Contemporary Sculpture: Sam Anderson & Michael Dean, Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL (2019); The Great Assumption, JOAN, Los Angeles, CA (2018); Big Bird, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2017); The Park, SculptureCenter, Queens, NY (2017); The Lonely Bull, Rowhouse Project, Baltimore, MD (2016); and Tally’s Folly, Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin, Ireland (2015). Selected group exhibitions include The Sammelung Philara, Düsseldorf, Germany (2022); The Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art, Ridgefield, CT (2017); Bortolami Gallery, New York, NY (2016); MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2015); Maccarone, New York, NY (2015); and White Columns, New York, NY (2015). Her films have been screened at Kölnische Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany; SVA Theater, New York, NY; and Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY. Her plays have been performed at 15 Orient, New York, NY and New Theater, Hollywood, CA. A monograph of Anderson’s work was published by Mousse on the occasions of her solo exhibitions at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany and SculptureCenter, New York, NY.