Kenzie x Sam Loe
Each month, Boutique Connection supports Sanderson Contemporary Art’s exhibition openings.
This is a collaboration of wine and art pairing where we pair a handcrafted New Zealand wine with the artist’s hero piece. The project explores how taste and texture can echo a visual experience and perhaps even enhance it.
I’m exploring the non-verbal dialogue between art and wine and pairing each artist’s hero piece with a wine that echoes its mood, energy, and emotion.
The aim is to translate visual expression into taste, inviting viewers to experience the artwork through another sensory lens. Each match is intuitive and collaborative, celebrating both the artist’s vision and the craft of our boutique producers.
Sam Loe - Between Two Lungs
Between Two Lungs is a solo exhibition by artist Sam Loe at Sanderson Contemporary.
Through her work, Sam explores sensation and the relationship between the inside and outside of the body. Using familiar materials in unexpected ways, she invites us to consider how we experience the world physically, through touch, texture and feeling.
There's something both intimate and intriguing about her work. The forms feel almost anatomical, yet strangely familiar, sitting somewhere between what we recognise and what we simply sense.
Connective Tissue
For our wine pairing, we chose Sam's Connective Tissue, a work created using spray paint and hand-cut stencils on a woollen blanket.
Layers of biomorphic shapes overlap and merge across the soft surface. Bloody maroons and dark umbers contrast with flashes of aqua, nude and light violet, creating a beautiful tension between the familiarity of the wool and the intensity of the imagery.
Sam described the texture of the work to me as being "like warmed skin", and that really stayed with me.
The shapes seem to move between one another, blurring the boundaries between what lies beneath and what we see on the surface.
I immediately imagined a wine that was hazy, generous and textural. Something with a fleshy softness, but also a little grip and structure. I knew I wanted a skin-contact wine to echo Sam's exploration of the body, but finding one with the right balance of aromatic white varieties and texture proved surprisingly tricky.
Then I remembered Kenzie Beautiful Strangers Orange 2025 from Hawke's Bay, and it was love at first sight!
An unusual skin-fermented blend of Pinot Gris, Muscat-clone Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, Beautiful Strangers is a wine that explores texture as much as flavour.
By allowing the grape juice to spend time in contact with its skins, the winemaker draws out layers of aromatics, subtle grip and complexity that wouldn't ordinarily be found in a white wine. Fragrant and botanical, with a generous, fleshy palate and chalky freshness, it has an intriguing interplay between delicacy and structure.
What I particularly love about this pairing is the idea of skin as a point of connection.
In Sam's work, the paint settles onto the soft fibres of the blanket, building layers of colour and sensation. In the wine, the grape skins leave their own impression, adding texture, colour and character to the juice beneath.
The unusual combination of Pinot Gris, Muscat-clone Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc brings together three different personalities, each contributing something of its own. Much like Sam's overlapping biomorphic shapes, the individual elements merge and interact, creating something far more intriguing than the sum of their parts.
Both invite us to look beyond the surface, to explore the space between softness and structure, and to appreciate how something familiar can become wonderfully unexpected.
Enjoy!
- Renée Dale
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Sam Loe
Between Two Lungs
14 October - 8 November 2026Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition Between Two Lungs by Sam Loe.
Sam Loe's paintings begin via a return to physical presence and the senses: resting, slowing the breath, letting the mind wander. Blankets become both her resting and working surfaces, evoking touch, skin, and warmth. They provide a soft territory for airbrushed paint to land through stencils hand-cut from drawings. As substrates, the blankets enhance the paintings as objects, creating a double-world where materiality and illusion meet.
Each painting in Between Two Lungs carries the trace of a body that has been listened to. A layer of soft tissue, a floating rib, a transparent membrane, overlaid by what could be a beckoning finger welcoming you into something alien yet familiar. Tongue pinks and fleshy maroons reinforce the bodily quality of figural forms, whilst raw parts of the blanket substrate, kept free of paint beneath the stencils, remind us of the object-ness and materiality of the paintings. In the smaller pieces the palette cools to nude, lilac and bone allowing breathing space.
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Read more here.
