Photo by Zan Wimberley

ABOUT

Artist Statement

Abstraction is a powerful medium for visual communication and creative expression. I work across various media to make geometric, abstract hard-edge paintings, sculptures, collages, and constructions. This enables me to take new risks and develop my practice in new directions.

Stemming from my early experiments, my process is influenced by the Cubist style. The simplification of form, paired with stylization, distortion, multiple viewpoints, as well as obscuring figure and ground allows me to use visual ambiguity and spatial confusion ‘as an element of play’.

By developing my own visual language, I seek to carefully compose a precise arrangement of structure, form, shape, colour and surface-texture that confuse the eye and mind, and manipulate the viewer's understanding and experience of space. The result are dynamic formations with explosive energy and rhythm, which are psychological abstractions that challenge with their complexity and satisfy in their resolution.

Artist Bio

Samara Adamson-Pinczewski is a leading contemporary Australian abstract painter and sculptor who lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. 

She received a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) from Monash University in 1998, a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) (Honours) from RMIT University in 1999, a Graduate Diploma in Education (Visual Art) from the University of Melbourne in 2001, a Master of Fine Art (Research) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2003, and a PhD from the School of Art, RMIT University in 2013.

Adamson-Pinczewski grew up in a loving and nurturing home that encouraged her creative expression from the start. In addition to drawing and colouring, she enjoyed regular visits to the National Gallery of Victoria and the Melbourne Museum with her mother and later was sent to extra-curricular art classes as a teenager.

Inspired by her grandfather, a refugee who worked himself up from a rags-and-bones man to running his scrap metal yard as a family business, she began to collect things and arrange them in a meticulous and idiosyncratic way - a precursor of the fragmented forms and reflective materials that would later inform her paintings and sculptures. With metal being a present part of her everyday life, from home decoration to formative colour experiences, this has also shaped her quest into exploring new developments in paint technology and material developments to creating scintillating optical effects.

Throughout her career, she continues to develop her art practice further by taking new risks, exploring new directions and working across various media, such as three-dimensional sculptures and kinetic mobiles.

Samara has held various solo shows since 2000. Recent solo exhibitions include the Charles Nodrum Gallery (2023, 2020, 2018 and 2016), Town Hall Gallery Hawthorn Arts Centre (2021), Gallery 9 (2015) and Langford120 (2014 and 2013).

Samara has also participated in many group exhibitions, e.g., + - Grometric Abstraction, Magma Gallery, Collingwood (2024); ARTitecture, Justin ArtHouse Museum, Prahran (2024); Abstraction 23, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne (2023); Of Colour and Light, West End Art Space, Melbourne (2023); A thousand different angles, McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery, Langwarrin, (2022). 

Her paintings and sculptures have also been shortlisted for major painting and sculpture prizes, including Bayside Painting Prize, Bayside Art Gallery, Brighton (2024); Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award, Deakin University, Burwood (2023) and (2022); and Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, Brett Whiteley Studio, Surry Hills, Sydney (2005) and (2004).

Samara has undertaken residencies in Europe, the USA and Asia. In 2016, Samara undertook the Art Gallery of New South Wales' Moya Dyring Studio Residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. In 2013, Samara was the recipient of the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts Residency Program in New Berlin, New York, USA. 

This year she returned to the Golden Foundation to collaborate with their Custom Lab and in turn undertake continuing artistic experimentation into newly available special effects colours at Golden Artist Colors.  

Samara Adamson-Pinczewski’s work can be found in major private and public collections throughout Australia. She has exhibited with Charles Nodrum Gallery since 2016.

CURRICULUM VITAE
Born Melbourne, Australia 

EDUCATION

GRANTS, AWARDS, RESIDENCIES

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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