What if the banality of a bowl of fruit became a space for reflection on form, matter, and our way of looking at the world? With his Fruit Bowls series, Sam Nicklin revisits the tradition of still life by injecting a contemporary and gently absurd perspective. A photographic work that invites both contemplation and questioning.
At Sam Nicklin's, fruit bowls are never quite what they seem. In his Fruit Bowls series, the British artist transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. Through his compositions, he freezes apples, bananas, grapes, and other fruits in poses that are both familiar and strangely static, as if they had stepped out of a postmodern dream. What at first glance looks like a simple domestic arrangement becomes almost a sculpture, even a symbol.
In the classical tradition, still life evoked the passing of time and fleeting beauty. In Nicklin's work, these elements persist, but are juxtaposed with a minimalist aesthetic. The fruits, often reduced to pure geometric shapes or stylized to the extreme, lose their naturalness and become a language. Each bowl or plate becomes a closed system, a silent setting where everything is calculated, weighed, and sometimes unbalanced.
Behind the refinement of the compositions and the formal rigor, a second layer emerges. Some bowls seem too full, others almost empty. The fruit floats or overflows in a slightly absurd choreography. This tension between order and chaos, between the functional and the decorative, provokes a discreet but essential smile. Sam Nicklin plays on this irony to question our expectations of art objects, utilitarian objects, and everyday objects.
Fruit Bowls is not a series about fruit. It is a series about perception. About what we choose to see, recognize, and interpret. By reviving an old genre with very contemporary codes, Nicklin does not stop at the objects photographed: he creates small scenes of observation, suspended moments that invite us to slow down. To see what's in the bowl, but also everything that spills over around it.
Clementine Deroche
