Oxford-based artist Sam Branton takes 18th- and 19th-century neoclassical landscape aesthetics and disrupts their formal elegance with surreal, absurd, and playful animal interactions. Set against classical river vistas and eccentric verdant gardens, these subtle, bizarre narrative scenes populate grounded terrestrial spaces with deep-ocean life, creating an immediate, eerie sense of misplacement. Rendered in the style of an overly curious 18th-century explorer, the animals inhabit paintings that feel like fragments of a lost, grander canvas. Much like the ruins they depict, these works hint at an expansive greater whole, acting as tiny glimpses into fantastical ferine worlds.

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