Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

Born in Baghdad, Mohammed Sami lives and works between London and Norrköping, Sweden. Having grown up in an artistic family, he achieved early recognition as the recipient of several prizes including, aged 14, representing Iraq and winning in a competition for the best young painter in the Middle East, hosted in Egypt. Sami studied drawing and painting at the Institute of Fine Art, Baghdad (2005) and worked at the Ministry of Culture. His role trying to recover artworks that had been removed from Saddam Hussein’s Centre for Contemporary Art made him an enemy to insurgents and members of the former regime. Surviving several attempts on his life, losing close friends, and witnessing scenes of execution, he eventually immigrated to Sweden after a friend from the French embassy offered him safe passage out of Iraq in 2007. Later moving to Belfast, he describes how the sight of art students in the city ‘pressed the trigger on [his] early dreams in Baghdad’. He graduated from Ulster University in 2015, and completed his Masters of Fine Arts degree at Goldsmiths College, London, in 2018. He has had solo exhibitions at Al Khanji Gallery, Aleppo, Syria (2006); Dag Andersson Gallery, Norrköping, Sweden (2012); JAMM ART Gallery, Kuwait (2013) and Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, London (2021). His work has also been included in group shows including ‘Towner International’, Towner Eastbourne Museum (2020) and ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries’, Liverpool Biennial and South London Gallery (2018).

Places

Subjects

blood, domestic interior, carpet

Materials & Techniques

Artist

Mohammed Sami (1984 - )

Title

Skin III

Date

2020

Medium

acrylic on linen

Dimensions

height: 225.0 cm; width: 285.0 cm; depth: 6.0 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from VO Curations, August 2021

Provenance

The artist via VO Curations; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 2 August 2021

GAC number

19017