Sam Samiee (b. 1988, Tehran, Iran) is a painter, essayist, and psychoanalyst in training based in Berlin and Tehran. He finished his Rijksakademie residency in 2015 and ArtEZ University of Arts and Design in 2013, where he was a painting lecturer until 2020. His primary education in arts began at the University of Arts in Tehran. He was a jury member of the Dutch Royal Painting Prize from 2020 to 2024. In 2016, he was among the winners of the same prize.
Sam Samiee synthesizes his heavy research on art history, Persian poetry, and psychoanalytic theories into 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 painting space 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.
Sam Samiee has exhibited his works at the 10th Berlin Biennale, at Kunstmuseum, the Hague; the Parasol Unit Foundation; Manchester Art Gallery; Art Basel Hong Kong; and Liste Art Fair, among other international presentations. Footnotes to Life, a monograph on his work awarded as a part of the Wolvecamp Prize for painting in 2018, has won the Best Dutch Book Design in 2020.