MARC STRAUS

A quiet sigh, the moment of contact in a gentle touch, a slight slouch in posture, a passing glance; Sam Jinks captures such transitory moments in his sculptures to call attention to the emotional weight often overlooked in such transient quotidian events.

His figurative sculptures have an uncanny likeness to life. However, Jinks’s sculptures transcend the silicone, resin, pigment and human hair with which he conjures the work. Indeed he has pushed the technical achievements of the genre as never before, but it is the emotional weight that enthralls the viewer. He has managed to make these works personal to each of us.

He does so with such exquisite and fleeting intimacy. A transient moment is captured. Newborn babies asleep against each other, the head bent slightly and eyes closed of the well-dressed older man supporting a nearly naked younger man (“Standing Pieta”) and a young woman kneeling in a momentary pause. Folds of skin, chipped nails, wrinkles of time, the pink of newborn skin, the spots of age, the way flesh gives way to the weights of the world. Frozen in their briefest and often most private moments we are given a rare opportunity to examine in close proximity the ordinary, imperfect and non- idealized body reduced to its purest form of expression.

Sam Jinks lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. His work has been exhibited internationally at La Biennale di Venezia, Palazzo Bembo (2013); McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, Langwarrin (2011); National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (2006/2007). Museum collections include The Kiran Nader Museum of Art, Dehli; Museo Escultura Figurativa Internacional Contemporaenea (MEFIC); the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Collection, Victoria; McClelland Gallery + Sculpture Park, Victoria; Shepparton Art Gallery, Victoria; Shepparton Art Museum, Shepparton.

Currently, his works are on view at exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery,Canberra, Australia and the Libieghaus Sculpture Museum, Frankfurt, Germany.

This is Sam Jinks’s first solo-exhibition in the United States. He is represented by MARC STRAUS, New York and Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney.