Sam Anderson

Tanya Leighton is pleased to present Lunch Hour, an exhibition of sculpture by New York-based artist Sam Anderson. Her new work employs permutations of stock figures to probe our fascination with stories of desire – plotlines where love is unreciprocated or endlessly frustrated.

Replacing protagonists with representations of skulls, Anderson’s sculptures suggest layers of the psyche where narrative exists as desire itself. They hold the place of archetypal lovers that circulate culture, such as the entwined couple of the Gli innamorati in Commedia dell’arte, the reluctant object of obsession via Penelope the cat from ‘Pepé Le Pew’, or the insatiable serial monogamist as Shel Silverstein’s Big O from ‘The Missing Piece’. Anderson draws such innately familiar motifs in and out of focus to isolate and dismantle the language around sentimentality.

Sam Anderson (born 1982 in Los Angeles, California) lives and works in New York. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include ‘I Never Loved Your Mind’ at Tanya Leighton, Berlin in 2020; ‘Contemporary Sculpture: Sam Anderson & Michael Dean’ at Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida in 2019; ‘A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing’ at Chapter NY, New York in 2018, and ‘Big Bird’ at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne in 2017. A monograph of Anderson’s work was published by Mousse on the occasions of her solo exhibitions at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Sculpture Center, New York.