Sam Porritt, One Thing After Another (Drawings 2005–2025), at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St.Gallen

One Thing After Another (Drawings 2005–2025) by Sam Porritt, curated by Giovanni Carmine, at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St.Gallen, 29/11/2025 – 15/02/2026.

“What are we doing here? And why should we care?”
The question opens the exhibition like a short, disarming breath.

In the calibrated silence of Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, One Thing After Another is not simply a retrospective. It is a line that complicates itself, knots, transforms. Sam Porritt guides us through twenty years of drawing as a daily practice, as an immediate and irreversible gesture, as an essential language for navigating the disorder of the world. No virtuosity, no illusion, only line, colour, form. And a hand that tries, draws, fails, repeats, as if every sheet were a question left deliberately open.

The exhibition space is bright, austere, almost disciplined. Yet the work is not so much observed as walked through. Sheets cover entire walls, sometimes arranged in tight grids, sometimes allowed to breathe. The journey begins with black ink on white paper, Porritt’s chosen medium for more than a decade. The early works reveal a searching mind. Between gestural tangles and recognisable forms, a constant tension unfolds between abstraction and figuration, between chance and intention. It is not so much about what is seen, but about how seeing begins. A face appears, then vanishes. A line coils, twists, then turns into a cage.

The spiral recurs, but it is not decoration. It is a logic, a mental exercise, a statement of continuity and uncertainty. In works such as Down and Out (2024) or A Map for a Menu (2007), Porritt explores the movement of thought as it draws. At times the line hesitates, at others it is assured, at others still it seems driven by a nervous automatism. In Familial Ties (2022), colour breaks through as a perceptual shift. Four flower-like forms, built up with layers of wax crayon, hover between depth and flatness, producing subtle optical vibrations.

The walls do not tell a chronology. Instead, they trace a network of connections, returns, transformations. Some drawings openly resist gestural immediacy. Sentiment (2009) and With the Benefit of Hindsight (2012) appear to work against expressiveness itself. Grids, repetitions, and modular structures dominate. It is here that the “looping line” first emerges, the line that folds back on itself, a gesture of absence but also a promise of direction.

Then come the ambiguous symbols, such as the shark fin, which Porritt calls “nature’s arrow.” It signals intention and threat at once. In Carrot Shaped Stick (2013), two oversized carrots cast in bronze are fused into an unstable equilibrium, undermining the oppositional logic of reward and punishment. Sculpture becomes visual paradox, irony made solid.

The second room opens up to exceptions. Here Porritt steps away from ink, experiments with hybrid languages, and inserts words directly into the drawing. Echo Chamber (2020), Bullied Moon (2018), Prosperity and Its Friends (2019), titles and images mirror each other, forming small devices of critical thought, often sharpened by a dry, cutting humour.

It is in the final room that a reversal takes place. Colour, pattern, optical illusion. Wax crayons overlap in dense, hypnotic surfaces that hover between ornament and vision. Porritt looks to Middle Eastern art, but also to the dynamics of the attention economy. Can an image hold the gaze indefinitely? Can it become visually addictive? Here, drawing turns into an active object, almost magical.

The exhibition concludes with the kinetic sculpture Duty of Care (2020). An eraser moves slowly in a circle, gradually pushing a stack of drawings onto the floor. A gentle yet determined gesture. As if to say that everything built can also be erased, or begun again. Perhaps this is the deeper meaning of Porritt’s practice, a constant inquiry, a discipline of doubt, a search for meaning through the simplest gesture.

Why draw? Perhaps because sometimes, to understand, a single line is enough.