Artists

Mohammed Sami

Press release

Modern Art is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Mohammed Sami. This is Sami's second solo exhibition with the gallery, and his first in Paris. To visit the exhibition, please click here to make an appointment. Vicious Circles continues Mohammed Sami's study of internal and external spaces, where state-sanctioned violence appears as an unresolvable aspect of everyday life, the quotidian. Across new mixed-media works on linen, Sami builds dense atmospheres that convey troubling absences and a sense of groundlessness about a world that may or may not have been: a curtain tie resembles a tightened noose; a lipstick becomes a bullet casing; a pile of leaves could be amputated hands. Into this vertigo of associations, Sami intensifies affect to create a sense of estrangement, where the blueness of a sky, or the colour of falling phosphorus is heightened to reveal it as something outside us – something alarmingly strange and other. As he states: 'There is light, there is beauty, but it is far away.' Sami was raised during Saddam Hussein's rule, and his paintings construct a critical relationship to representation and the image: to the way in which power makes spectacles of violence. Yet Sami is not interested in depicting scenes of atrocity; rather, he reconfigures the textures of daily life so as to reveal the constant presence of violence within it. The home – with its ordinary domestic objects – becomes the site of this strange refraction of the political. Looking at a painting by Sami means accepting to see and not to see; to be shown and to be withheld; to be implicated in the conditions of seeing. Sami constructs these worlds as part of an unfinished history; something both burned out and belatedly arriving back into the mind. Mohammed Sami was born in Baghdad in 1984, and lives and works in London. Having completed studies at the Institute of Fine Arts, Baghdad, he worked at the Ministry of Culture before emigrating to Sweden in 2007. Sami graduated from Belfast School of Art in 2015, and earned an MFA at Goldsmiths College, London, in 2018. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include: KM21, The Hague; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (both 2025); Blenheim Art Foundation, Woodstock; Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaudengo (both 2024), Camden Art Centre, London; and De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea (both 2023). He has participated in group exhibitions at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2026); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2025); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2024); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2022). His paintings are held by the Art Institute of Chicago; Buffalo AKG Museum; Arts Council Collection, London; the Government Art Collection, London; Musée National d'Art Moderne, The Centre Pompidou, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London. He was nominated for the 2025 Turner Prize.