Over the past two decades Sam Rountree Williams has developed a distinctive and indelible body of work. In such pieces we see the artist utilising spatial constructs and stylistic devices associated with traditions of folk and näive art, yet with a palette, materiality and scale of the academy trained. Intent to interrogate the psychological self, such works swell with sense of quiet unease; mapping what the some have described as the ‘loneliness of subjective experience.’
The scenarios in his paintings are imagined, and relate to waking reality as a dream does. Of this he says, ‘In my paintings there’s no before or after what is depicted: they move without going anywhere.’ His works feature recurring characters, and often a central, solitary figure—possibly evoking Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic work Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), albeit in cartoon form. The cartoon an abstraction, working to make the paintings less autobiographical, inviting viewers to project themselves into the role of the protagonist, and thus identifying more directly with the sentiments and situations depicted.
Sam Rountree Williams (b. 1986, Kirikiriroa Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand) lives and works in Berlin. He gained his BFA from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, in 2007; and from 2009-10 he was a guest student at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Recent exhibitions include: Headlands, Sumer, Auckland (2024); How to fight loneliness, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington (2024); Nature, Charim Galarie, Vienna (2023); Freedom, Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington (2023); Sam Rountree Williams and Sabine Voltz, Sonneundsolche, Düsseldorf (2019).