Soft Belly

Sam Loe

'Soft Belly' 2025

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Woollen blanket, satin edging and acrylic spray paint

2460mm x 2510mm

$5,500

 

Sam Loe (b. 1975 Zug, Switzerland) is a New Zealand-based painter whose large-scale, unstretched paintings investigate abstract and biomorphic gestural icons and forms. Her process often begins with body sensing meditation, lying or sitting on blankets and pillows to activate rested and wandering mind states. These blankets become both her resting and working surfaces, evoking touch, skin, and warmth whilst providing soft territory for the airbrushed paint to land. As substrates, the blankets enhance the paintings' physical presence as objects, creating a double-world where materiality and illusion meet. Her paintings resist codification, speaking instead to the figural as form that maintains sensation beyond figurative representation, hovering on the cusp of recognisability.