Canonicity

Black, with curved horns, it stands along Spain’s roads and motorways: the Osborne bull. Few images there are as familiar, few as charged with meaning. SAM3 takes on this sign and transforms it, with paint, with bones, with fire.

From billboard to landmark

The bull was created in 1956 as an advertisement for a brandy made by the Osborne bodega. Hundreds of the huge silhouettes were put up across Spain. When roadside advertising was banned, the bulls remained, without lettering, as pure form. Today they are considered part of Spain’s cultural heritage and an unofficial emblem of the country.

SAM3 has painted two of the real Osborne bulls in the landscape: one with the animal’s skeleton, another as a baby bull. In Canonicity we show how he brings this motif into the gallery. For the exhibition he rebuilt the bulls in wood and treated each one in its own way.

Skeleton, calf and ashes

As with his bull in the landscape, SAM3 has painted the animal’s skeleton in white on one of the replicas: skull, ribs and leg bones lie on the black silhouette as if the animal were being X-rayed. He surrounded a second with sky blue and shrank the black bull inside it to a calf. The third he burned. The charred wooden silhouette with its pale scorch marks hangs next to a photo series documenting the burning.

The result is three readings of one sign: the death behind the symbol, the small within the large, the destruction of a myth. These are interpretations. SAM3 lets the pictures speak for themselves, without explaining them.

The heavy head

Alongside the bulls we show drawings in ink on paper and a ceramic piece. The sculpture shows an oversized head on a body that is too small. It can be related to René Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”: human beings live through their thoughts. At the same time it shows how top-heavy we are and how often we think too much. Figures with oversized heads are a recurring motif in SAM3’s work.

About the artist

SAM3 was born in Elche in 1980 and currently lives in Murcia. He started out with graffiti in the 1990s. He is known for his silhouettes, which he calls “shadows”: black, anonymous figures, often as tall as a house, that merge with their surroundings. His murals are ironic, poetic and provocative. Reduced to a few colours and a graphic style, they have an unusual presence and reveal their message only gradually.

In 2007 SAM3 took part in Banksy’s Santa’s Ghetto project in Bethlehem. His murals can be seen in more than ten countries, including at the Fame Festival in Grottaglie and the Outdoor Festival in Rome. Besides painting, he works with sculpture, ceramics and drawing, and tells whole stories in experimental stop-motion short films. At Pretty Portal he showed the solo exhibition Nice to meet you in 2010.

“Canonicity”
SAM3
Vernissage: Friday, 26 April 2015, 7 – 10 pm
Exhibition: 26 April – 14 June 2013
The artist will be present.
Pretty Portal, Brunnenstraße 12, 40223 Düsseldorf

Note (2026): In 2017 SAM3 painted another real Osborne bull, in the salt flats of Santa Pola, with motifs from Picasso’sGuernica*. He saw the work as a protest against bullfighting.*