Sam Mitchell's signature and 'sensational' portraits 'from the inside out' take a light hearted and subversive look at style, at markers of identity and how popular culture internalises and surfaces in the individual psyche. Her favoured medium - perspex painted from behind - provides a slick industrial flat surface which interacts with the ideas at play in her work,reinforcing the tension between the veneer of the outer character and his or her suggested inner life.

A collector and recycler of found imagery drawn from the Internet, comics, cartoons, graphic novels and old books, Sam also produces drawings and watercolours on recycled paper, pages or covers of old books.

Sam completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in 2000. Since then she has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work is in public collections in New Zealand and in private collections in New Zealand, the US, the UK and Egypt.

In 2010 Sam was the Paramount winner of the Wallace Trust Art Award, which led to her spending six months in New York in 2011 on a residency at the New York's International Studio & Curatorial Program. In 2014 she won the William Hodges Southland Trust Residency in Invercargill and in 2015, the Sarjeant Gallery Tylee Cottage artist residency in Wanganui.

For more information, or a copy of the artist;s CV, please contract the gallery.