Sam Samiee
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Sam Salehi Samiee (1988, Tehran) is an Iranian artist based in the Netherlands and Iran. Working as a painter and researcher, he presents his work in immense installations all the way to traditional modes of presenting paintings. His research focuses on history of painting, psychoanalysis and Persian Adab. He attempts in his work to unite the west’s visual culture with the east’s word-oriented culture. By breaking with the tradition of the two-dimensional painting, he repeatedly questions how an artist can portray the three-dimensional world. As he himself says, ‘Painting is a way of further developing and shaping all my ideas and thoughts.’
In the forthcoming publication Playing Constant: The Only Constant Is Change, a short summary of Samiee’s lecture “Constant Nieuwenhuys in 2024: Aesthetics & Ethics of a Post-Settlements World” will be published, which was addressed to the department of painting at the Royal Danish Fine Art institute in Spring 2024. Playing Constant is a publication by Jap Sam Books in collaboration with Zippora Elders and Fondation Constant, reflecting on the Constant 101 project, due spring 2025.
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Samiee was the winner of the Royal Free Painting Prize in 2016 and has been a jury of the same prize for five years since 2020. In 2018 Samiee won the Wolvecamp Prize for Painting, granting him to publish a monograph on his work titled Footnotes to Life, a winner of the Best Dutch Book Award in 2021.
In 2018, Samiee exhibited the installation Love gone vagabond, Intellect fell after it at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, in which he combined works from 2014 till present day. Samiee also included works in the museum’s collection by artists he feels a kinship with: Constant, Paul Thek and Emo Verkerk. For the installation, Samiee selected Constant’s model Orient Sector, 1959.
