ART CITIES:Zurich-Sam Falls

Sam Falls’ work is inspired by the beauty, unpredictability, and ferocity of nature, and attempts to, as he says, “Traverse issues of abstraction and representation in a meaningful way”. Combining colours, textures and subject matter, the final works are visually enticing and provoke the audience to contemplate their many possible meanings.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Eva Presenhuber Archive

Sam Falls made his body of work, that is on show in his solo exhibition “Foreign Correspondence” during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Plague, Spanish Flu, HIV/AIDS, we have been here before. He found comfort in Renaissance masters, in Botticelli, in Veronese, in how they balanced the limits of the mortal world with the promise of eternity. The twist of St. Lucy’s dying body, dagger at breast, provided part of the formal authority for two pieces, a leaf from a philodendron placed here, layers of color there. By bringing devotional iconography into his en plein air practice, he asks viewers to contemplate parallels between figures and ferns, between his actions and the environment, between heaven and the leaves of grass. The pieces are not translations. They merge bodies and nature to present beginnings and ends as one. “Super Bloom, Ancient Earth (Mojave Desert” (2020) is like a new type of direct photograph, it is dust in the wind, a skeleton lying in a field of poppies, a canvas covered in powdered pigment, veils of black, red, green, and yellow sprinkled from above, soaked in by rain. Flowers removed, bones gone. A gorgeous haze of life and death. Sam Falls came to art through the study of physics, linguistics and philosophy. Inspired by the natural world, he creates artworks that explore the materiality of colour and light. Using a range of generic objects and textiles, such as garden hoses, tyres, wooden pallets, bed sheets and moving blankets, and exploiting the aesthetic potential of weather patterns and environmental conditions, Falls employs photographic techniques to create works that investigate the opposing ideas of abstraction and representation. Often created outside in the urban or natural landscape, the scale of Falls’ artworks is influenced by and connected to the places they are made. Using fundamental image-making techniques, Falls transforms large swathes of canvas into abstract landscapes that carry echos of the environment in which they were produced. His ‘rain paintings’ are essentially photograms; a negative shadow image transferred to a surface without the use of a camera. Falls covers expanses of canvas with organic matter – branches, leaves and flowers that are particular to an area – before scattering the assemblage with handfuls of pigment and leaving it exposed to the elements. After the intervention of mist or rain and the removal of the organic material, the residual silhouettes and patterns imprinted on the canvas retain the physical qualities of place. While the artworks exemplify Falls’ fascination with colour and light, and advance his investigations into figuration and abstraction, the canvases also display an intimate connection with location and landscape.

Photo: Sam Falls, Night Rain, Morning Mist (Autumn), 2020, Pigment on canvas; 2 parts, Painting 1: 170.5 x 160.5 x 3 cm / 67 1/8 x 63 1/4 x 1 1/8 inches, Painting 2: 170.5 x 316.5 x 3 cm / 67 1/8 x 124 5/8 x 1 1/8 inches, Total dims.: 170.5 x 477 x 3 cm / 67 1/8 x 187 3/4 x 1 1/8 inches, © Sam Falls, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zahnradstrasse 21, Zurich, Duration: 27/3-15/5/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.presenhuber.com