Listen back to the artist talk with artist Sam Samiee and director/curator Lih-Lan Wong
NMAG Storage Sessions I
08.09 - 29.10. 2023
No Man’s Art Gallery proudly presents When Hell Breaks Loose I’ll Tell You Your Legs Were Always On My Mind the first solo exhibition by Sam Samiee at the gallery. Across his multifaceted career as a painter, essayist and psychoanalyst in-training, this exhibition specifically highlights the artist’s sixteen-year engagement in drawing, emphasising the prioritisation of queer aesthetics throughout vulnerabilities and crises.
The rooms of No Man’s Art Gallery show over two-hundred rarely exhibited drawings - spanning from 2008 - 2023 - that are thematically divided into landscape and flora, imaginative scenes, figuration and still life. The title of the exhibition alludes to an overarching theme throughout the artist's artistic and research-based endeavours: voicing a poetic eroticism or playfulness in the light of crises.
Samiee refers to his practice as post-cinematic. Central to his practice are installations embedded within the architecture of the exhibition space. The way they are edited relate to the process of playing with semantics. An example of this is seen in relation to his models, friends and conversants, revealing a deep connection of shared moments and dialogue that influenced sensual, political and relational elements guided by the artist's long involvement in psychoanalytic settings and thinking.
While Samiee separates and engages independently with drawing as a rationalist enterprise of measuring and recording the real world, his other endeavour, poetry and deconstruction of language, intertwines as subject matter of the drawings. Drawing and visual arts are put to work to materialise notions, concepts and abstract constellations that have seemingly lost their touch with materiality. Finding life-driven forces within situations that are deadening; finding a playfulness at the moment of drawing still life, machines and objects of everyday life; envisioning familiar and unfamiliar landscapes of mountains and lowlands, and collecting thoughts and ideas for a future view. Through the unique installation of the drawing archive, new connections appear between nodal points of the works.
His drawings breathe life into verses from poetry, figures from world mythology, and his own lines, avoiding mere literary illustration. An abstract scene of a lover's embrace is interlaced with a written fragment of Mohammad Reza Sharjarian's "A Lover's Plight," a Persian song calling on lovers to pour their hearts into their cups like tulips blushing. Samiee's recurring exploration of the connection between a verse of poetry and drawing or painting such as in his use of the promethean motif, leads to fresh interpretations and interconnectedness among these semantic points.
Amid over two hundred drawings we find scenes of mourning, death, the crucifixion and Iran-Iraq war tragedies yet always with the presence of the sanctuary that is beauty. The drawings invite access to the subtext of Samiee’s oeuvre, as amongst the chaos it is the beautiful thighs, chests, the Mountains Zagros Ranges and the blossoming orchid branch that offer solace.
Seen from a chronological point of view, and if compared with the exhibiting trajectory of the artist, one is able to observe how Samiee challenges literary hegemony within his culture and others by infusing architecture, physicality, color, and line into a playful discourse. His work exposes and puts on trial ideologies that regulate bodies, allowing both himself and viewers to confront the material reality of his subjects. In his more recent drawings, an embrace of the decorative and the poetic become increasingly visible.
When Hell Breaks Loose I'll Tell You Your Legs Were Always On My Mind reveals a decade of the backstage of the artist practice, research, obsessions, tests and notes which hold together a wide range of emotions, fantasies, and ideas that Samiee has relied on or will return to in the future of his ongoing explorations.
The opening is followed by NMAG’s 5 Year Anniversary Party from 9pm onwards. Join the celebration at Bos & Lommerweg 88 with cocktails and music late into the night.
Public Programme:
Artist Talk | Sam Samiee in conversation with Lih-Lan Wong
When: Thursday October 26th 2023
Time: 6pm - 8pm
Location: NMAG & de bar, Bos en Lommerweg 88-90, Amsterdam
Painter, essayist and psychoanalyst in training Sam Samiee will give an artist talk in conversation with director and curator Lih-Lan Wong.
RSVP to Artist Talk (free admission)
Photos: Tommy Smits
Sam Samiee in his solo booth on Art Rotterdam 2023, by Lucas Marcus Schilder
Sam Samiee (b. 1988, IR) is a painter, essayist and psychoanalyst in training based in Amsterdam, Berlin 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, 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.
Graphic Design: Peter van den Hoogen (Coup)