Ancient bridges and classical columns vanish into emptiness or are enigmatically interrupted. Vines cascade from once splendid triumphal arches, ferns spring from earthy niches in majestic towering walls whilst crumbling statues lie dusty, abandoned; silent reminders of once great empires.

Quiet contemplation of Sam Kaprielov's deserted ruins evokes an indefinable nostalgia for bygone ages in which memories, legend and a sense of prophecy of the distant future become intermingled. The shattered remains of marble horses and heroes, half sunken and forgotten in the earth, suggest an inevitable decline of even the proudest, most powerful kingdoms, recalling the romantic verse of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandius.

Sam Kaprielov's work is a visionary Surrealism which unites symbols from mythology, religion and philosophy and is embellished with objects of ethnic ritual from around the world. Floral wreaths, beads, poles, shields and masks connect his work to the mystical heritage of many disparate cultures.

Particularly powerful amongst such ritual objects is the mask, draw from memories of Sam’s time as a mask maker in Venice. The masks echo the duality of the works themselves: darkness and light, positive and negative, the conscious and the unconscious, rational clarity and the irrational.

Sam Kaprielov was born in Ventspils on the West Coast of Latvia; he attended art college in Leningrad before returning to Riga. He began his career as a billboard painter, the most lucrative form of employment for an emerging artist. In 1992 he moved to Venice to become a mask-maker and arrived in London, via a two-year spell in Avignon, in 1998.