Now Representing: Sam Falls
Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce representation of New York-based artist Sam Falls, whose work employs an adept, inventive synthesis of painting and photographic processes to explore motifs of time and ecological care. For the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in 2023, Falls will debut a new series of glass sculptures, augmenting his distinct practice that is at once art historical, elemental and poetic. Jessica Silverman’s representation of the artist is in partnership with 303 Gallery, Galerie Eva Presenhuber and Galleria Franco Noero.
Falls’ work is situated across genres and art historical references such as the photogram, minimalist sculpture, French symbolism and land art; his practice deconstructs a technological application and works with exposure in a completely organic way. The artist is best known for his large-scale canvas works that use water-reactive dry pigments and compositions of plant-life. Unlike 20th century photography and printmaking made indoors, Falls creates outside, allowing atmospheric components like rain, sunlight and wind to figure in his work. As such, his canvases operate as primary sources of the environment and the passage of time. In 2017, for example, he traveled to all nineteen California National Forests indexing regional and native flora like Ponderosa pine, deer fern, and wild buckwheat in vibrant hues, often just weeks before wildfires ravaged these areas. The resultant works are spectral yet painterly compositions that spatially and temporally map the state’s ecologies.
Alongside his paintings the artist is also known for his ceramic wall-works and sculptures, where flowers and plants are pressed into slabs of clay and then glazed. In both mediums the artist complicates site-specific contexts, activating organic matter beyond its origin, preserving its silhouettes like a kind of fossilization and a memento mori.
Falls recently unveiled a new monumental public sculpture at 633 Folsom Street in San Francisco inspired by photographer Ansel Adams and poet Gary Snyder. Constructed of stainless steel, corten steel and California granite, the sculpture catalyzes a minimalist form to engage with the passage of time, embracing the changing nature of steel as it weathers and colorizes.
Sam Falls was born in 1984 in San Diego, CA and grew up in Vermont. He lives and works in New York, NY. He received his BA from Reed College, Portland, OR and his MFA from ICP-Bard, New York, NY. Falls will be the subject of an upcoming solo exhibition at MOCA Cleveland, OH. Falls has had solo exhibitions at Laumeier Sculpture Park, Saint Louis, MO (2019); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany (2018); Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporaneo di Trento e Rovereto, Italy (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Zabludowicz Collection, London (2016); The Kitchen, New York (2015); Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2015); Pomona College Museum of Art, CA (2014); Public Art Fund, New York (2014); LAXART, Los Angeles (2013); and Printed Matter, New York, (2012). The artist’s work is in the permanent collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris; Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Palm Springs Art Museum, CA.
