Recent graduate Sam Agnew '16 will be showcasing his "Of Whom" series at a space in SoNo: 17 Washington St. There will be an opening reception Saturday, Aug. 20, from 6-9PM, featuring live music provided by some of his former GFA classmates.
Sam said he encourages the community to come out for this family-friendly event. "Whoever is interested in this sort of thing should come, bring your families and your friends, and tell people. It’s going to be a good time," he said.
Sam Agnew is an artist who follows the concepts underlined in Freudian theory in the attempt to further understand his own subconscious. He has recorded his dreams, and carries a notebook at all times, doodling and sketching ideas and thoughts constantly. He expands his personal reflections by creating his own visual interpretations in large-scale oil paintings. Although this practice is often an embodiment of surrealism, his major influences extend towards neo expressionist and neo pop contemporary artists, such as Takashi Murakami and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and his work is an embodiment of contemporary neo-expressionism. Sam Agnew’s work reveals a crude and monstrous definition of human form, especially in contrast with beautiful, yet ambiguous, environments. His characters often find themselves in a frustrating state of perpetual incompleteness, as they react to their amorphous surroundings. This is representative of post-modernist and existentialist thought. As Peter Saul astutely notes “art is harmless”. People tend to create art to blend with the norms of its origin, not to create difference. His work derails itself from this stereotype, creating intrinsically harmful art. As a result, his work often exemplifies villainy, and hatred; themes that are often swept into the dark corners of human definition. Artists have a responsibility, or at least opportunity, to be a representation of modern society, and his art may be attempting to represent the forgotten realities essential to defining that society as a whole.
Sam Agnew is currently studying Art History and Fine Arts at Tufts University and the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts.