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  • 2026 Melbourne Art Fair
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  • 2017 Melbourne
  • 2016 Singapore
  • 2015 Sydney
  • 2015 Venice
  • 2014
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  • <=2010
  • Beginnings — David Hanson
  • Paper on AI and non-human animals presented at EcoMedia IV conference, RMIT 2022
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Sam Leach

  • 2026 London: Frieze
  • 2026 Melbourne Art Fair
  • 2025 Sydney: Leisure Herd
  • 2023 Melbourne: Emotion Harvest
  • 2023 Melbourne: Slick Slopes
  • 2022 Sydney: Everything Will Probably Be Fine
  • 2020 Sydney: Fully Automatic
  • 2018 Adelaide MOD Museum
  • 2017 Melbourne
  • 2016 Singapore
  • 2015 Sydney
  • 2015 Venice
  • 2014
  • 2013
  • 2012
  • 2011
  • <=2010
  • Beginnings — David Hanson
  • Paper on AI and non-human animals presented at EcoMedia IV conference, RMIT 2022
  • essay about AI generated paintings
  • CV
  • Contact
Sam Leach

 

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David Hanson, 2013. Chapter from an unfinished monograph on Sam Leach.

The lift at Spacement was just what it said. Sort of.

At one end of the gallery stood two white square-section travertine columns, boxed out in white plasterboard to meet the space's side walls. Between and set back from the columns was a rectangle of polished aluminium, the lintel and sliding doors of an elevator. Only on close, slow, ambulatory examination did you notice that the lines of lighting track and other ceiling services continued back above the doors, through where the lift shaft should have been. Moreover, this lift had no call buttons, no L.E.D. display of numbers above, no evident movement between floors. In truth, despite the compelling physical evidence of stone and metal, The lift at Spacement was just an illusion, a somewhat stripped-back, abstracted, minimalist illusion. Underscoring the artifice, an unframed, superflat oil on aluminium, Lift painting 3, hung on one of the white walls perpendicular to the lift doors. Smooth, geometric and photographic, rendered with close attention to the artefacts of light - small shadows, vague reflections of the columns in the polished floor, spots of white on the grey metal doors - the painting was, in its own way, as teasing as the installation.

In this early installation and painting, with its teasing, frustrating moebius-strip of opposition and conjunction, abstraction and illusion, lie some of the beginnings of Sam Leach's more recent and current practice.

The artist himself is to a certain extent just such an artificial creation. Going right back, his friends at high school weren't into art at all, really, and while he enjoyed art as an elective subject, 'when it came to Uni, Economics was what we were all doing.' (1) So he stayed with his cohort and spent three years completing a Bachelor of Economics degree at the University of Adelaide. He did, however, maintain a certain level of interest in and engagement with art during this period, through drawing - big, scratchy charcoals in the late 1980s vogue - and, with a friend, through editing an art magazine, a low-budget, photocopied product with the combination classicist-surrealist-thrash metal-Warhammer title Random torso. On graduation, with the nation in recession and very few employment opportunities in South Australia, Leach moved to Melbourne and took a job with the Australian Taxation Office. But the art thing still wouldn't go away. He studied after hours, beginning with Council of Adult Education short courses and then completing a TAFE College Diploma, before finally enrolling part time in Fine Art at RMIT University, at the age of

From here the career trajectory is quite conventional: full-time studies, honours, a Master's degree, a few shows with artist-run spaces like Spacement, a couple of prizes, then the first successful solo shows ... But the initial professional gap, the kink, is fundamental. Those years in the anaesthetic wilderness, in the paradoxical Alice in Wonderland world of statistics, in the belly of the economic beast, in daily entering the graph-gridded facade and immigrant-intimidating foyer of Hassell's Casselden Place government office building have given Leach's art a particular, unusual edge.

There is something more than gratuitous or solipsistic aesthetic gamesmanship at issue in his oeuvre, which is visible even in these early works such as Lift painting 3. The written outline for his Master of Arts program explicitly and specifically proposed to examine 'the ways that corporate space, as exemplified by the foyers, conference rooms and offices of contemporary corporations, reflect societal anxieties about wealth and power.' Both that postgraduate research and the artist's ongoing practice are clearly closely engaged with historical, political and scientific realities, presenting us with serious and meaningful philosophical questions.

Even without its encompassing architectural frame, its real-world reference, its sight-gag support, Lift painting 3 is still chilling in its air-conditioned airlessness. It reminds us that the emptiness of the modern corporate foyer is a concrete proclamation of power. All that valuable real estate put to no apparent use signals the scale of the capital at the company's disposal, its capacity to occupy extensive, expensive space negligently, at will. Around the time of The lift at Spacement Leach painted several works based on images from the 1968 film Play Time, Jacques Tati's wry vision of 'a Paris of the near future sterilized by maze-like international-style towers and controlled by whiz-bang technology unintelligible to its users.' (2) In Play Time, Tati's awkward, charming, scruffy and all-too-human Monsieur Hulot is forced to negotiate a risibly rigid world of skyscrapers, plate glass and office cubicles, of car parks and traffic jams, with a soundtrack of muttered or loudspeaker-barked American-accented jargon and the constant tap-tap-tap of high-heeled secretarial shoes on marble floors. (

In exploring this Le Corbusian dystopia, Leach was struck by the coincidence of atmosphere between 20th century international architecture and 17th century Netherlandish painting, by the aesthetic resonances between his research photographs of the foyers of BHP Billiton, Telstra, 101 Collins Street and so on, and the Dutch Golden Age genre of church interiors, paintings by artists such as Gerrit Houckgeest (1600-1661), Emanuel de Witte (1617-1692) and especially Pieter Saenredam (1597-1665). (4) In both of these settings the visual-experiential encounter is with crystalline perspective, with plain, light-toned surfaces, with a vast emptiness; in both settings a severe, decorative restraint balances the spatial excess, in both we feel the coincidence of (to use the title of Max Weber's sociological classic) 'The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.' (5)

In the history of Western art, what the culture of capitalism does is to create a new kind of pictorial physics, an open and virtual spatiality in which everything is negotiable. A work which has become a particular touchstone for Leach is the National Gallery of Victoria's fine Portrait of a woman by Gerard Ter Borch (1617-1681). In this, as in many of the artist's portraits, the figure is precisely drawn; the rich luxury textures of her sober, modest garments are lovingly replicated; she has a compelling physical and psychological density of presence, a real weight. Yet the field in which she stands is radically non-specific, with just one visible shift where wall meets floor, the rest being a soft ochre and grey segue from back to front, top to bottom. (Indeed, it is believed that the table on the left of the picture is a later addition, a device to help anchor the figure more securely within the surrounding void.)

It was this aesthetic, of representation within and according to nothing more than the fall of light (or of Calvinist divine grace), or the movements of the stock exchange, which gradually drew Sam Leach more and more towards the Dutch tradition, 'and I've been kind of stuck in the long 17th century ever since.' (6)

(1) Sam Leach, interview with the author, 17 May 2013

(2) Gideon Haigh, The office: a hardworking history, Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2012, p. 186

(3) Gideon Haigh notes a meta-ironic footnote to the movie: as soon as Tati finished filming, Play Time's vast and complicated set was demolished - to permit construction of a cloverleaf bypass (ibid., p. 187).

(4) See Angela Vanhaelen, The wake of iconoclasm: painting the church in the Dutch republic, Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2012

(5) Max Weber (tr. Talcott Parsons), The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (1904), London, G. Allen & Unwin, 1930

(6) Sam Leach, interview with the author, 17 May 20133) 26.