Samuel Ross: COARSE

Friedman Benda is pleased to present COARSE, the gallery’s second solo presentation of acclaimed British designer, artist and creative director Samuel Ross, and the first to take place in New York.
Evolving from his ongoing interest in the historic visual languages of West African furniture, post-industrialized Western culture, modernism, and brutalism, the works presented in COARSE point to the links between body, material, meaning, and memory. A notion that, for Ross, is about geography; about the body and space, about the body in space.

Ross’ work asserts itself in space through mass, weight, and rawness. Industrialized materials such as fired wood, metal, stone, and marble are lacquered with turmeric, honey, and milk before being fired. For him, these organic materials, speak of past hands, processes, gestures, and “carry memory, intentions and philosophies from the heartland in which the originate.”

Samuel Ross’ COARSE is a study that expands upon the meaning of the object, without sacrificing its function. A rich and layered narrative landscape, this new body of work underlines process as a form of ritual, ritual as a form of making, and process as narrative-giving.

Learn more at https://www.friedmanbenda.com.