All works

Lenin’s Urn

Object · Sir John Soane’s Museum, London

A battered Victorian railing finial outside the Tavistock Place house where Lenin once lived was scanned, enlarged and remade. Layers of paint, wear and repair become the form of a new urn: a precise reproduction of an object shaped by time.

Lenin’s Urn, a black urn with a heavily textured surface on a white background
An alternative studio view of Lenin’s Urn

Layers of time

The surface records the accumulated paint, wear and repair of the original railing finial.

Lenin’s Urn alongside bricks, a tape measure and an open volume of Lenin

An object among objects

The urn is photographed with bricks, a tape measure and an open volume of Lenin.

The urn-shaped finial on black street railings, with buildings behind

The original finial

The small architectural ornament is seen in its everyday setting on the street railings.

The railing finial outside a doorway at number 36

An ordinary setting

A wider view places the finial among the railings, steps and doorway.

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].