Luke Samuel

British artist Luke Samuel approaches his oil paintings with a deep appreciation for them as objects in space. His canvases are hung in precise relationships on the walls of his studio as he works, with each composition informing the others. “The works are made in conversation with one another,” he says. “I move them around the wall to find combinations that feel full of possibility. There’s sometimes a whole show’s worth of paintings being composed at once, and it can be a precarious job deciding when one is finished – one canvas may end up being repainted ten times, its iterations layered on top of one another.”

Samuel studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and presented his work in the Royal Academy Schools Show in the summer of 2022. He gained a BA in fine art at Goldsmiths College, London, and a diploma in art at Howard Gardens College of Art. His work was shown in the RBA Rising Stars show curated by the Royal Society of British Artists in 2018, and has also been shown at Kupfer Projects, Class Reiss, and Union Pacific in London. He was born in Cardiff, and currently lives and works in London.

Samuel’s work is intended to be viewed in combination, and is hung in specific arrangements in gallery environments. His ‘radiator’ canvases sit just above the ground, and other smaller canvases are composed to hang above them, or transition across walls. “I think of the canvases in an almost sculptural sense,” he says. “They encourage viewers to be aware of the space around them, the qualities of the light in the room, and the differing sense of scale they exhibit.”