Sam Foley is a contemporary New Zealand landscape painter. His detailed paintings portray and often combine the natural and urban world, merging aspects of hyper-realism and photo-realism.
Foley has exhibited internationally, with works placed in a number of public and private collections. From 2007 to 2018 he was a regular visitor to Europe, basing himself between Dunedin and Berlin, exhibiting throughout Europe and Scandinavia. In 2013 he was the recipient of the Kaipara Foundation Wallace Arts Trust Award which included a 4 month residency at the cultural centre Altes Spital in Solothurn Switzerland.
Currently, he is happily ensconced with his family, back in his home city of Dunedin.
‘My practice is mostly not concerned with painting beautiful landscapes, it’s more subversive than that, in being about finding ways to paint mundane or sometimes even ugly locations in a beautiful way. It’s the tension created in attempting to transcend the subject that interests me.
Further back, moving image and how the two mediums of painting and digital projection can be combined into a singular medium was a focus. Creating ‘moving image paintings’ which shift and change, using light and texture in a complex way, a simulacrum of a simulacrum which still retains the integrity of time and place. They move with incident and create memories.
The urban landscape as a subject; the man-made and it’s encroachment into an environment. Line opposed to curve, the nature of chaos vs conformity, the myriad variations between absolute light and terminal dark are my constant fascinations.'
https://www.samfoley.co.nz
