29.05 - 26.07.2026
The Trophies | Sam Samiee
Opening: Friday 29 May, 4–8 PM
Speech: 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
Please RSVP to the artist talk (free admission) here.
The Trophies is about beauty as a form of sustenance. Created amid war, Sam Samiee turns to painting flowers, poetry, and portraits of beloved thinkers. These trophies are not symbols of conquest, but of endurance, memory, and resistance. Still lifes of plants and domestic interiors become gestures of tenderness against destruction, while portraits of writers, poets, and political thinkers honour those whose words and visions have sustained the artist through catastrophe. Beauty is treated not as escape, but as a vital force for living: a way of preserving love, thought, and imagination when the world itself seems on the verge of collapse.
Sam Samiee wrote a Declaration of Intent, The Trophies, to be read here.
Sam Samiee, Shiraz, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24 cm
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, NMAG, 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, private and public. Public collections include: Akzo Nobel Collection (NL), Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (NL), DNB Collection (NL), Teylers Museum (NL).
Sam Samiee in his studio. Photo by Mania Karimianpour, 2026