Art Rotterdam
8 - 12 Feb 2023
Booth 47, Solo / Duo Section
Sam Samiee
No Man's Art Gallery is honoured to present 'Footnotes to Life', a solo presentation by Sam Samiee (1988, IR), titled after his eponymous artist book. 'Footnotes to Life' brings together Samiee’s multifaceted practice of the last three years which crystallised in a new series of (extended) paintings that embraces the uncertain and decorative as a mode of painting.
Press:
#MeettheArtist: Sam Samiee, by Wouter van den Eijkel, Gallery Viewer, 2023
Art Rotterdam 2023 - 10 Art Works You Really Want To See, Interiorator, 2023
ONLINE CATALOGUE
The Undulations of Contingency, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 98 x 132 cm. Photo: Gert Jan Van Rooij
Sam Samiee ‘Footnotes to Life’, Solo Booth documentation, Art Rotterdam 2023
Sam Samiee ‘Footnotes to Life’, Solo Booth documentation, Art Rotterdam 2023
Untitled, 2022, acrylics on canvas, 147 x 112,5 cm. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij
Sam Samiee ‘Footnotes to Life’, Solo Booth documentation, Art Rotterdam 2023
Sam Samiee (1988, IR) is a painter, essayist and psychoanalyst in training based in Amsterdam, Berlin and Tehran. He finished the Rijksakademie residency in 2015 and ArtEZ University of Arts and Design in 2013, where he was a lecturer of painting until 2020. His primary education in arts began at the University of Arts in Tehran. Samiee synthesises his heavy research on art history, Persian poetry and psychoanalytic theories into a studio practice that employs painting in multiple registers. The characteristic of his installations as extended paintings is the break from the tradition of flat painting and a return to the original question of how artists can represent the three-dimensional world in the space of painting as a metaphor for a set of ideas. He employs a range of painterly attitudes from oil paintings to iPad paintings, figuration, abstraction, the break of the rectangular frame and usage of text among other methods. Recently Samiee’s work focuses on a period of painting that parted ways from avant-garde, with the emphasis on decorative modes of work, of artists such as Matisse and Bonnard.
Sam Samiee’s works have been exhibited in Kunstinstituut Melly (2022), Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (2018), Berlin Biennale X (2018), Parasol Unit Foundation (2019) and Art Basel Hong Kong (2018). Samiee has finished a two-year residency at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2014-2015, Amsterdam), is a jury member and former winner (2016) of The Royal Dutch Award for Modern Painting and (2018) The Wolvecamp Award for Painting and has been a lecturer at AKI ArtEZ Academy for Art and Design (Enschede, Netherlands) for four years. As a part of the Wolvecamp award for painting Sam Samiee published a monograph titled “Footnotes to Life”, which won him the Best Dutch Book Design in 2020.
Sam Samiee. Photo: Frans Nikkels