Biography
Sam King (b. 1995, Manchester, UK) is a British/Australian artist, living and working in London. Originally from South West UK, he developed an early practice based in street art and graffiti, which he pursued during a year living in Melbourne, Australia. Upon his return to the UK, he studied Fine Art at the Art Academy London, an atelier style school where he developed his oil painting techniques. Later, he completed a year at Turps Art School, going on to exhibit his work globally.
His most recent exhibitions include ‘The Future of Loneliness’, Guts Gallery, Curated by Maria Dolfini, London; ‘Don’t Ask a Fish What Water Is’, Palazzo Monti, Brescia, curated by Edoardo Monti; & ‘Imaginarium’, Public Service Gallery, Stockholm, curated by Silvana Lagos.
He is now currently completing his Masters at The Royal College of Art, London.
Artist Statement
My paintings hover in a state of instability. Created using a pointillist technique drawn from pixelated imagery, they flicker and fragment, disintegrating the structure of the image itself. Each work becomes a site of tension where process and image compete - shimmering nodes simultaneously making and unmaking the whole.
I draw on sources from art history, personal photography, internet culture, and digital software. In my paintings, these fragments coalesce into dazzling surfaces that both attract and obscure, echoing how images now function: consumed in distraction, passively absorbed, reality replaced by fantasy. Within this, I use motifs such as water, fountains, and umbrellas. They suggest leisure and reverie - rest, immersion, gentle escape. Water, in particular, becomes a metaphor for invisible systems we inhabit but rarely perceive, while it also holds personal meaning: a space of renewal and return, but one that slips from containment.
Strange animals - like smiling dolphins - populate the work. These creatures, inviting yet emotionally vacant, reflect the alienation at the heart of our relationship with images. Symbols such as disco balls and retrofuturist motifs evoke nostalgic visions of "what could have been," exposing a loop that endlessly recycles the past. This numbing, self-reinforcing cycle erases agency and authenticity, trapping us in a market-driven repetition.
My process shifts between digital and physical - 3D modelling, sketching, painting. This oscillation both reflects contemporary image culture and resists it: materiality and the human hand disrupt the sterile surfaces of reproduction.
The spectacle is the process by which we cannot see. My work attempts to unveil this illusion. Representational painting’s ideology - that it is a window into a world - is dissolved into pure sensation: light, colour, surface. Flatness and depth coexist - both literally, as images collapse into abstraction, and metaphorically, as authenticity and superficiality entwine.
CV
Education.
Royal College of Art 2024-2025
Turps Off Site Course 2021-2022
The Art Academy, Fine Art Diploma, 2015-2018
Selected Solo exhibitions.
2024 – Don’t Ask a Fish What Water Is, Curated by Edoardo Monti, Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy
2023 – Seeing is Believing, Eve Leibe Gallery, London
2022 - Will We Meet Again, Brushes with Greatness, London My Whole World, The Artist Contemporary Atelier, Online
Selected Group exhibitions.
2026 – Cub_ism , Shanghai, China.
Internet Cafe, Hypha Studios Curated by Juliet Wilson
2025 – Masters Degree Show , Royal College of Art
2024 – The Future of Loneliness, Guts Gallery, Curated by Maria Dolfini, London
2023 – Imaginarium, Public Service Gallery, Curated by Silvana Lagos, Stockholm Between The Bridge And The Door, Pictorum Gallery,London Cacotopia, Annka Kultys Gallery, London
2022 – Fever Dream, Vortic (Online Exhibition) Curated by Daria Borisova (also displayed at Santa Monica Art Museum) Water is Not for Sale, Bloom Galerie, St Tropez Touchwood, Eve Leibe Gallery Hosted by Prior Art Space, Berlin Soho Revue x The Little Scarlet Door, London. Voices for Love, Prior Art Space, Barcelona Turps Off Site Leavers Show, Thames Side Gallery, London. Together/Somewhere, Visionary Projects x ArtCityWorks, Online #1 Exhibition, ArtsinSqaure, Online
2021 – London Design Week, The Bottle Factory, London Pulp, The Florence Trust, London Rea Fair, Milan, Italy
Residencies.
2024 – Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy
2022 – Pictorum Gallery Residency, London Eve Leibe Project, London
2020 – PADA studios, Lisbon, Portugal
2019 – Art House Holland, Leiden, Netherlands Auc Art Lab Residency, London, United Kingdom
2017- Jardin Orange Artist Residency, Shenzhen, China