About
Sam Burke’s work examines food as a cultural, symbolic, and emotional subject, using art-historical reference to explore ideas of abundance, desire, and disconnection in the present. Their paintings draw primarily on early Renaissance and later European traditions, particularly market scenes and still lifes, where food is depicted as plentiful, ordered, and often miraculous or divinely sanctioned. These images present abundance as something promised and guaranteed, while glossing over the material realities of labour, production, and scarcity.
This logic of abundance is carried into the work and placed under pressure. The paintings focus on what happens when these inherited visual languages collide with a contemporary relationship to food shaped by excess, convenience, and detachment. Food functions as a seductive image, drawing the viewer in, while carrying an underlying discomfort that resists resolution or easy moral positioning.