Claim to Fame

Gary Indiana | Artforum | 1st September 2019

Sam McKinniss copies. He takes images from the internet, “emblematic images of pop culture”, and recreates them as paintings. Most revealing are images of the famous – “celebrities are fictional, whatever else they are”. His art “[invests] pieces of the cultural commons with their due grandeur. For me, the best of McKinniss’s paintings express exuberance and dread in equal measure.”