All works

Against Nature

Oil on found paintings · 2022–23 · Betts Project, London

Black geometric forms painted onto second-hand landscape oil paintings bought on eBay. The original paintings retain their damage, dirt and faults. Forms derived from the geometry of the frames interrupt the landscapes, holding the flat canvas and the fiction of pictorial depth in tension. The series explores how images construct ideas about nature, land and ownership. The Repaint works are included here as part of the same investigation.

Against Nature (Forest Lake), a found landscape painting interrupted by a black geometric form.

Forest Lake

The paintings begin as second-hand landscapes bought on eBay. Their existing damage, dirt and faults remain. Black forms derived from the geometry of each frame interrupt the landscapes, making the painted scene and the physical canvas visible at the same time.

Installation of Against Nature paintings on gallery shelves

Installation view, Betts Project

Against Nature: black geometry painted into a lake landscape

Lake

A black rectangle interrupts a painted landscape of hills

Hills

Black geometric intervention in a river valley painting

River valley

Repaint 1

Repaint 1

Repaint 2

Repaint 2

Repaint 3

Repaint 3

Repaint 4

Repaint 4

Repaint A

Repaint A

Repaint B

Repaint B

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

Opening the files…

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].