Who Is Sam Leitch?

Contemporary New Zealand artist, Auckland (Tāmaki Makaurau)

Sam Leitch is a contemporary artist based in Auckland, New Zealand, working primarily within painting and screen printing.

His practice is built around narrative: the idea that an image can carry a story, create tension, and hold layers of meaning that reward extended looking.

His work is immediately recognisable: bold graphic forms, confident use of colour, and a compositional intelligence that feels both designed and alive. Beneath the visual precision is a consistent interest in everyday symbols such as birds, objects, moments recontextualised into something stranger, richer, and more resonant than their origins suggest.

The practice

Leitch works across two primary print mediums. His screenprints are hand-pulled in collaboration with a team of expert craftsmen and women at Artrite Screen Printing using a multi-colour layering process: each colour separated, stencilled, and pressed through a mesh screen onto archival fine art paper. The process is painstaking and physical, and the results carry the distinctive quality of handmade work: a graphic boldness that sits somewhere between painting and design.

His giclée prints use high-resolution archival inkjet technology to achieve works with greater tonal complexity — layered colour relationships, textural nuance, and subtleties of light and shadow that complement his broader painterly interests.

All editions are small. Most screenprint editions are limited to 50 prints or fewer, with a small number of artist proofs retained for the studio archive. Works are signed and numbered in pencil by hand.

Themes and influences

Narrative has always been at the centre of Leitch's work. He is drawn to the way visual symbols carry cultural weight. The way a bird, a glass, a gesture can become loaded with meaning depending on its context and framing. His work doesn't explain itself; it creates space for the viewer to bring their own reading.

Surrealism is a touchstone - not the dreamlike strangeness of Dalí, but the more grounded, conceptual surrealism of artists who use familiar imagery to defamiliarise the world. Combined with the graphic clarity of screenprint, the result is work that operates simultaneously as visual art, design object, and narrative puzzle.

Collections and reach

Sam Leitch's limited edition prints are held in private collections in New Zealand and internationally. His work is available directly through samleitch.com, with domestic and international shipping available.