Sam McKinniss

Sam McKinniss (b. 1985, Northfield, Minnesota) is an artist living and working in New York City and Kent, Connecticut. His figurative paintings are most often sourced from popular culture, the entertainment industry, sports, and the internet. He is inspired by narratives focusing on romance, celebrity, tragedy, the inevitable destruction of innocence in contemporary American life. In a 2019 Artforum cover story featuring McKinniss, the novelist and critic Gary Indiana writes, “Sam’s recent paintings suggest a deft, saturnine, facetiously sincere autobiography of taste and tastelessness that reveals less about the artist than the spectator, though in this case, the artist is spectator, too. These paintings…are really unlikely things, samples from the blazing horror vacui we inhabit as alleged global citizens, ergo very familiar, but suffused with pathos, even suffering, as well as flash and comic incongruity.” McKinniss’s paintings have recently been on view at JTT in New York, Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, and currently included in the group exhibition Pictus Porrectus: Reconsidering the Full Length Portrait, curated by Alison M. Gingeras and Dodie Kazanjian for Art&Newport in Newport, Rhode Island.