Online catalogue

Press:
Verwelkte rozen, in De Groene Amsterdammer, July 2026

29.05 - 26.07.2026

For the occasion of this exhibition, Sam Samiee wrote The Trophies, A Declaration of Intent.
Listen back to the artist talk of Sam Samiee with Sara Giannini here: NMAG Storage Sessions | The Trophies.

The Trophies | Sam Samiee 
Opening: Friday 29 May, 4–8 PM
Opening word: Hester Alberdingk Thijm, 6:30 PM
Artist talk: 7:00 PM (Sam Samiee in conversation with Sara Giannini)
Location: No Man's Art Gallery, Bos en Lommerweg 88-90

Curatorial text by Lih-Lan Wong:
There could hardly be a more urgent time to present this body of work, all created after October 7th, 2023. In a present shaped by repression, rationalisation and alienation from the body, eros and the sacred, Sam Samiee offers a language of poetry, beauty and persistence amid crises.

Having had the privilege of working with Samiee very early on, I can say that few artists have shaped my thinking so profoundly. For decades, his work has insisted on beauty not only as decoration or escape, but as a way of enduring. Across flowers, landscape, portraits, poems, interiors and still lifes, The Trophies gathers works made during war and displacement, where painting becomes a means of remaining human within catastrophe.

Back in 2014, when we were both part of W139 in Amsterdam, Samiee introduced us to a reading of Norman O. Brown’s The Challenge of Islam, in which he proposed that without bringing Islam into our equation, we fail to confront the unknown - an idea we were exploring in a more optimistic time, amid the rapidly changing Warmoesstraat and the persistence of that free haven run by artists. Through Samiee, I came to understand the unknown not only as abstraction or idealisation, but as attention. Samiee has dedicated his practice in relation to so many people, histories, peers, feminism, vulnerability and beauty.

The Trophies is shaped by an urgency and generosity toward those Samiee portrays, by a sustained commitment to queer aesthetics in times of crisis, and by adab; an aesthetics inseparable from ethics. Such as the homage to Shiraz and the story of Abish Khatun of the Salghurid dynasty, a queen remembered in legend as having offered herself in marriage to Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, when he reached Estakhr near Shiraz. In that account, she names her mahrieh not in gold or land, but in the city itself: Shiraz. A sacrifice by seduction that led to the sparing of the city. The portraits in this show, at first sight, form an unlikely gathering. Rosa Luxemburg appears through her attention to flowers while imprisoned in Berlin. David Graeber enters through his writings on political possibility and collective life.

Fereydoun Farrokhzad returns through memory, music and exile. Agha Shahid Ali brings together queerness, Persia, Islam and longing. James Baldwin remains present through his insistence on loving America without surrendering to it. Brown reappears as the thinker who opened pathways between Western intellectual history, Islam and Iran. Alongside them are translated poems, anonymous sitters, artist friends and fragments of political imagination that together form an unstable archive of affiliations.

“When hell breaks loose I’ll tell you your legs were always on my mind”, a line from Samiee’s poetry and previous solo show, continues to resonate throughout the exhibition. Made between Berlin, Tehran, Boston and Cambridge during a period marked by genocide, war and expanding violence reaching towards Iran, the works turn towards flowers, domestic objects and intimate gestures. They return to writers, revolutionaries and thinkers whose words accompanied the artist at moments when communication, certainty and community felt fragile. For years, Samiee had imagined turning towards a decorative and non-phallic way of painting, toward flowers and the pleasurable, life-affirming capacities of image-making. War accelerated this impulse. Beauty and refinement became urgent rather than secondary, not distractions from politics, but ways of surviving it.

Throughout the exhibition, painting, poetry and translation move in conversation with one another. Still lifes from Berlin are painted in Tehran. Ink works begun in Boston meet portraits completed elsewhere. Places collapse into emotional and political simultaneity. In Samiee’s work, subjects and objects are not bound by the limits of the nation state, but shaped through a transnational aesthetic language. What emerges is a refusal to abandon refinement in moments of devastation. The figures and objects united less by ideology than by their capacity to speak beautifully amid catastrophe. Painting becomes a way of staying close to life while hell breaks loose .

Photos by Jonathan de Waart

Sam Samiee (b.1988, IR) is a painter and essayist based in Amsterdam and Tehran. He is a winner of the Royal Award for Painting in 2016 and Wolvecamp Prize in 2018 and finished the Rijksakademie residency in 2015 and ArtEZ University of Arts and Design in 2013, where he was a lecturer of painting until 2020. Samiee synthesises his heavy research on art history and Persian poetry 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 has exhibited internationally, recent solo shows include: When Hell Breaks Loose I’ll Tell You Your Legs Were Always on My Mind, No Man’s Art Gallery, NL (2023), 175 Trials & Errors, Dastan Basement, Tehran, IR (2023), A Garden of Clouds, Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, NL (2023). Samiee has exhibited his works at the 10th Berlin Biennale, at Kunstmuseum, the Hague; the Parasol Unit Foundation; Manchester Art Gallery; Art Basel Hong Kong; and Liste Art Fair, among other international presentations. Footnotes to Life, a monograph on his work awarded as a part of the Wolvecamp Prize for painting in 2018, has won the Best Dutch Book Design in 2020. Most recently, Masir Curatorial - a new collective co-founded by Samiee, debuted with their first group show What’s Your Treasure? in Kazerounian Mansion, Shiraz, IR.

Samiee’s work is placed internationally in public and private collections. Public collections include: De Rijksoverheid (NL), Akzo Nobel Collection (NL), Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (NL), DNB Collection (NL), Teylers Museum (NL).

Sam Samiee in his studio. Photo by Mania Karimianpour, 2026