Blue Shop Gallery presents
Samantha Fellows
‘Interference’
Gallery 1
16th September - 3rd October 2026
PV Wednesday 16th September 6-8pm 2026
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours:
Thu - Sat | 12pm - 5pm or by appointment
Samantha Fellows (b.1971, New York) is a London-based artist, she has a BFA in Fine Art from Oregon State University and finished a year with Turps Art School in 2023. This summer Samantha exhibited in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition and she is looking forward to exhibiting in Unbound at the John Martin Gallery in September and then this year’s Cass Art Prize at the Bomb Factory in November. In 2025 Samantha was selected as one of 26 artists to be part of the New Contemporaries and showed with them at the South London Gallery and then MIMA in Middlesbrough earlier this year. Last year she was also selected for the John Moores Painting Prize exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery and shortlisted for the Cass Art Prize at the Copeland Gallery, where she won the Michael Harding Oil Painting Prize. Samantha showed twice with curators OHSH Projects recently: in ‘Pedigree’ at The Bottle Factory and in 2024 in ‘Taste: a taste of the British art scene’ with Wönzimer Gallery in Los Angeles. Her work has twice been selected for Blue Shop Gallery’s ‘Works on Paper’ exhibitions and she showed with the gallery in their 2024 group show ‘When the Curtain Falls’ as well as at this year’s London Art Fair 2026. She is a member of Contemporary British Portrait Painters.
INTERFERENCE
Samantha Fellows’ paintings capture split-second moments: fleeting experiences and memories held in a thin film of translucent oil paint over the slick, reflective surface of aluminium. Working quickly, Fellows has approximately three days before each layer ofpaint loses its malleability. Within this brief window, she drags, brushes, scratches and wipes back the oily colour, moving between definition and dissolution until an image, and an accompanying sense of something, is secured.
In Interference, the artist’s physical engagement with the surface becomes both a method and a metaphor. Paint is removed from the aluminium to reveal the light beneath, the brightness of the ground becoming an active part of the image. The surface is disturbed and reworked, its glossy clarity interrupted by marks that describe lace, grass, light and the body.
At the centre of the exhibition is the young bride. Veiled in lace and held in intense sunlight, she appears suspended between the recognisable and the elusive. Her image carries the visual language of a photograph, a fragment of a forgotten experience, but the story it might tell remains uncertain. Who is she? What has brought her to this moment? And what might lie beyond it?
The lace both reveals and conceals. It becomes a material through which the artist explores the tension between clarity and ambiguity, while inviting the viewer to construct a narrative around the figure. The bride’s life is open to speculation: is she being interfered with, or is her trajectory being altered by wedlock? Is the wedding a beginning, an ending, or simply a moment caught between the two?
Fellows’ paintings offer no fixed answers. Instead, they hold the viewer in the space between an image and a memory, between what is seen and what is imagined. Through the interference of paint, light and surface, a fleeting moment becomes something we can almost remember.
PRESS
South London Gallery Interview 2026
hello@blueshopcottage.com for all catalogue requests.
‘Efflorescent’
Samantha Fellows
2026
Oil on aluminium
28 x 33 cm
‘Ambra Dolce’
Samantha Fellows
2026
Oil on aluminium dibond
15 x 20cm