Sam Lock. Stanza

Cadogan Gallery inaugurates its 2025 exhibition programme with the return of Sam Lock to the Milanese venue of the gallery: from February 26 to April 12, 2025, the British artist presents Stanza, his third exhibition in Milan, following his solo show at Scalo Lambrate in 2021 and the inaugural exhibition of the Milanese spaces of Cadogan Gallery in 2023.
Through more than seventy works, with this exhibition Lock retraces some of the main themes of his poetics, such as the visual transposition of language, the presence-absence dichotomy and the link between the fragment and the infinite. The materiality of language and the rhythm of narration, both at the basis of his artistic sensibility, invade the space and the title of the solo exhibition, Stanza, recalls the poetic definition of a group of verses that are part of the same composition, summarizing the bond between the works on display.

Like the verses of a poem, Lock's works have the same structure: they derive from the same roll of canvas, each with marks, colours, similarities and differences... for this reason, the individual works have relevance in their uniqueness, but also, like the notes of a sheet of music, they release new meaning when they are 'read' all together, as a single corpus.

The exhibition alternates between two cores, the first consisting of five large canvases united by their large size and the creative process: starting from the same roll of raw canvas and using pen and ink, Lock created the canvases by cutting, stretching and framing them with aluminium. This cycle of creation led to five works dedicated to five moments, or stanze, part of a single act in which the theme of the fragment and the infinite, the value of the individual work and the choral value of the whole, can be found.

The second core of the exhibition presents an installation consisting of 70 works, each characterised by different signs, brushstrokes and aspects. Created on paper made of resin-coated and then sanded panels, the signs remain suspended on the wall, in a succession of presence and absence, and give the impression of taking the form of notes or letters. Only by reading the entire installation does one grasp a single untold story, or rather, as the artist himself defines it, a map of looking.

Sam Lock (London, 1973) lives and works in London. His works are collected in various private collections. He has been represented by Cadogan since 2015.