Born Los Angeles, 1982, lives and works in New York
In the broadest sense, Sam Anderson is sincerely a product of a Los Angeles/Hollywood film and TV culture, wherein lens-based, macro-envisaging fantastically liberates ontological things from all restrictive obligations of dimension. Anderson’s work indicatively occupies the low floor, making giants of the viewer; her sculptures (like stage sets viewed from the ‘gods’) combine arcane folk narratives, playful characterizations and linear structures sourced from video and arcade games, combined with reflections of contemporary urban malaise. Described as “…slightly seedy city grids, as viewed from a circling helicopter” her work can be understood as biting satirical commentaries upon cosmopolitan life. Sam Anderson’s pre-occupation with the form of the fable and the literary genre of Fantasy foregrounds a world with no right or wrong, in terms of both scale or object/moral relationships.
In 2019 Anderson participated in the two-person exhibition Contemporary Sculpture: Sam Anderson & Michael Dean at Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida. Other notable recent solo exhibitions include: The Great Assumption, JOAN, Los Angeles (2018); Sam Anderson: The Park, Sculpture Center, New York (2017); Big Bird, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2017); The Lonely Bull, Rowhouse Project, Baltimore (2016); Grandfather Clock, The Vanity East, Los Angeles (2015); Flowers and Money, Chapter NY, New York (2013), in addition to featuring in the group survey exhibition Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2015).
The first monograph on the artist’s work was published by Mousse Publishing in 2017. Anderson received her MFA from Yale University, Connecticut (2010) and she presented her first solo exhibition with mother’s tankstation, Talley’s Folly, in 2015.