Sam Anderson's I Never Loved Your Mind @ Tanya Leighton in Berlin

Sam Anderson’s sculptures resemble prototypes, directly expressed and emptied of unnecessary detail that might over-define their meanings. The show’s title implies a potential, singular narrative, yet Anderson privileges a plurality in which no one protagonist drives the plot. Objects and ideas are collected and arranged in spite of their differences in materiality and characterisation.

Sculptures with titles such as ‘Imagination’ and ‘Opportunists’ illustrate these hard to depict concepts. They do not narrativise them, aiming rather to define them visually. The faceless figures strung together in ‘Opportunists’ move backward and forward, both entering and exiting an open door frame. Likewise, the features of the two sandwich-board men, who serve as the emblem for ‘Imagination’ are so rounded that it is easy to confuse which direction they face. A negotiation takes place between determinate and indeterminate elements. The implication of language paired with minimal gesture creates an evocative psychological space wherein the audience fills in the finer details.

I Never Loved Your Mind will be on view throughout March 7 at Tanya Leighton Kurfürstenstraße 156 & 24/25 10785 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Sam Anderson "Endless Love" @ Tanya Leighton in Berlin

Tanya Leighton presents Endless Love, the first solo exhibition at the gallery by American artist Sam Anderson. Anderson's multidisciplinary practice focuses on the peripheral, the bit-part actors of life that arrive to bring about plot development and then slink off to the fringe. These figures are studied and organized, but never defined by Anderson, who asks her viewers to regard their personalities as carefully as they would themselves. Arranged into grid-like patterns that call to mind urban planning, public smoking areas, playgrounds, and other spaces that have been imagined and built for human interaction, Anderson's sculptures are subject to the impulse of an architect they have never met. Sam Anderson "Endless Love" will be on view until January 14, 2016 at Tanya Leighton, Kurfürstenstraße 156, 10785 Berlin, Germany