All works

A Common Treasury

Print · London

A billboard commissioned by Rumi Bose and Aldo Rinaldi for the London Festival of Architecture. Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Hagar and the Angel (1646) meets words from the Diggers’ True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649), bringing two contemporary but opposing ideas of landscape into one image.

A Common Treasury
A Common Treasury

Repeal enclosure

The picturesque depended on wealth, labour and changes to the land. The project connects its idealised views with the enclosure of common land and the loss of shared rights.

A Common Treasury

A Digger picturesque

Claude’s paintings and the Diggers’ actions belong to the same historical moment. The billboard imagines a different course of history, combining romantic landscape with the common wealth of the land.

Poster combining Claude Lorrain’s landscape with the words Make the Earth a Common Treasury

Make the earth a common treasury

The poster combines a seventeenth-century landscape with the Diggers’ demand for shared access to the land. The dark interruption makes political language part of the view.

A Common Treasury billboard beside a street

On the street

Placed on a billboard, the image brings questions of land and common wealth into public space. Its setting shifts the landscape from a private picture towards a shared encounter.

For exhibitions, acquisitions and commissions: [email protected].

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Selected works

50 works in 4 files. More to come.

About Sam Jacob

Sam Jacob makes work that explores the strange lives of familiar things. His work draws on the images, objects and fragments of history through which we construct ideas of nature, culture and ourselves.

Across drawings, objects, installations and curatorial projects, he examines how architecture and material things embody social and cultural ideas, how ‘fictions’ become ‘real’, how ideas become things, and how things become ideas.

Collage, copying and processes of reconstruction are central to this practice, which also moves between digital processes and physical materiality. These transformations and translations bring both humour and unease to questions of memory, value and meaning.

Solo exhibitions include Against Nature (2023) and Empire of Ice Cream (2019) at Betts Project, London, and Disappear Here at the RIBA Architecture Gallery (2018). His work has also been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the V&A, MAK Vienna, the National Museum in Oslo, the Graham Foundation in Chicago and Secession, Vienna, and at Manifesta and the Venice and Chicago architecture biennials.

Curatorial projects include A Clockwork Jerusalem, co-curated with Wouter Vanstiphout for the British Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; The Lie of the Land at MK Gallery; and Pattern as Politics, with Priya Khanchandani, at the 2019 Lisbon Architecture Triennale.

Jacob is a columnist for ArtReview, writes Strangeharvest, and is the author of Make It Real: Architecture as Enactment. He is Professor and Dean of the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Die Angewandte), and directs Sam Jacob Studio, a collaborative architecture and design practice.

For exhibitions, gallery enquiries, acquisitions and commissions, contact [email protected].