Sam Loe - Between Two Lungs: Preview Catalogue

Sanderson are pleased to announce the exhibition Between Two Lungs by Sam Loe will open October 14th 2026.

Sam Loe's paintings begin via a return to physical presence and the senses: resting, slowing the breath, letting the mind wander. Blankets become both her resting and working surfaces, evoking touch, skin, and warmth. They provide a soft territory for airbrushed paint to land through stencils hand-cut from drawings. As substrates, the blankets enhance the paintings as objects, creating a double-world where materiality and illusion meet. 

Each painting in Between Two Lungs carries the trace of a body that has been listened to. A layer of soft tissue, a floating rib, a transparent membrane, overlaid by what could be a beckoning finger welcoming you into something alien yet familiar. Tongue pinks and fleshy maroons reinforce the bodily quality of figural forms, whilst raw parts of the blanket substrate, kept free of paint beneath the stencils, remind us of the object-ness of the paintings. In the smaller pieces the palette cools to nude, lilac and bone allowing breathing space.

Loe sees this process as a documenting of sensory properties that exist in a space before words and narratives take hold. A subjective felt experience known in philosophy and neuroscience as qualia, or the 'raw feels' of consciousness. By attending to sensation, her drawings and paintings weave together the inside and the outside of the body, giving way to a dynamic and fluid process: one that contains both an intrinsic chaos as well as possibilities for order and rhythm.

"Painting gives us eyes all over: in the ear, in the stomach, in the lungs (the painting

breathes)" - Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation.

Deleuze suggests that sensation is not about knowing the world as it is represented, but about feeling the passage of sensation as a force of matter and the transformation it causes in the body, particularly in the nervous system. For Loe, this observation comes through connection to her breath, which in these works can be considered as a working material, weaving together both vitality and vulnerability, without resolving one into the other.

Loe's awareness of the spongy fragility of lungs is heightened by her experience of mothering a child through repeated occurrences of pneumonia and a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. Her process involves inhabiting and regulating the breath, but there are also times where it is hard to breathe; to safely paint with an airbrush, a respirator must be worn to avoid inhaling the tiny air particles of paint that fill the air. Loe asks how her art practice can offer care and healing through ongoing challenge, personally and collectively: literally, how do we keep breathing?

The use of spray paint also speaks to the way breath once carried saliva-mixed pigment through a hollowed bone onto a cave wall. Such ancient drawings and handprints leave an unknown yet undeniably felt presence that spans across time. Loe continues her interest in how painting can connect painter, painting and viewer in an ongoing somatic dialogue where space and time merge. In Between Two Lungs you'll find a heart held gently, a conversation between inhale and exhale, sometimes tension, moments of ease and maybe a shared breath.

Artist Bio

Sam Loe (b.1975, Switzerland) is an Aotearoa-based painter whose biomorphic paintings, often large-scale and unstretched, investigate abstract motifs and gestural icons and forms. Having completed her original studies at Goldsmiths College, London in the nineties, she returned to painting after a career teaching yoga, meditation and somatic movement. Following post-graduate study in Ōtepoti Dunedin, Loe went on to complete her Master of Fine Arts with First Class Honours at Whitecliffe College of Arts & Design in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in 2025. Loe has been selected as a finalist for the Molly Morpeth Canaday Award 2026.

Please contact info@sanderson.co.nz for more information