Across the breadth of his work, Mohammed Sami has focused consistently on the relationship between contemporary painting and episodic memory. The experience of what Sami calls “thereness”: the feeling of being momentarily and unwittingly thrust - often through a sensation - into a place in one’s mind that is not “here” but somewhere else, is central to his work, which draws on his own experience of migration in early life and its enduring effects on his subjectivity. Honing his use of various technical capabilities, including composition and framing, colour, texture and titles, Sami seeks to push contemporary painting's ability to elicit specific atmospheres without making anything explicit or directive. Yet conflict seems to lie beneath the surface of every work, each with its own independent character and setting. In service of this, Sami’s paintings are always unpeopled. His compositions are often deliberately jarring – their framing obscuring natural perspectives, revealing only partial details of a scene or situation, evoking an unsettled and fragmentary state of mind. Viewpoints seem either too close - showing only detail and no depth of field - or obscured through shadow – large sections of the canvas blacked out – leaving one with a disturbing sense of being somewhere in-between; not quite here nor there. Colour, texture, light and shadow take on central roles in his careful construction of mood. His brushwork expands to make use of everyday materials mixed into paint, such as sand and spray paint, adding a further complexity to his visual vocabulary. It is through the convergence of these different elements of painting that questions of how sensations, moods and atmospheres translate to episodic memory emerges.

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. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2022); Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art (2022); the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); the Hayward Gallery, London (2021). His paintings are held by the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo; Arts Council Collection, London; the Government Art Collection, London; SF MoMA, San Francisco; ICA Miami; MAMCO; Geneva; MoMA, New York; The Carnegie Institute of Art, Pittsburgh; the Imperial War Museum, London; LACMA, Los Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Tate, London; and York Art Gallery. In 2023, Sami’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Camden Art Centre, London, his first solo institutional exhibition in the UK. In 2024, Mohammed Sami presented a large-scale solo exhibition at Blenheim Palace.