Mohammed Sami: Remembering Baghdad at Camden Art Centre

Mohammed Sami, One Thousand and One Nights (2022). Mixed media on linen. 286 x 557 cm. Courtesy the artist, Modern Art London, and Luhring Augustine New York.

Mohammed Sami, The Point 0 (2020). Acrylic on linen. 170 x 120 cm. Courtesy the artist, Modern Art London, and Luhring Augustine New York.

Mohammed Sami, Meditation Room (2022). Mixed media on linen. 280 x 230 cm. Courtesy the artist, Modern Art London, and Luhring Augustine New York.

By Rory Mitchell – 27 January 2023, London

Mohammed Sami b. 1984, Iraq Follow +

During a visit to Mohammed Sami‘s studio, painter Luc Tuymans advised the Baghdad-born artist, who was granted asylum in Sweden in 2007, to ‘paint the sound of the bullet, not the bullet’.

This advice has seeped into every aspect of Sami’s institutional solo show, The Point 0 (27 January–28 May 2023) at Camden Art Centre, London, where figures are nowhere to be seen—their presence only hinted at through a door ajar, or washing lines dripping with laundry.

The same nostalgia and unease linger throughout the exhibition, playing into the artist’s imagination of the Baghdad he left behind.

Sami achieves an impressive sense of transience for works of such scale—no doubt aided by the use of spray paint, alongside denser layers of paint applied with brushes and palette knives.

Already, the Goldsmith graduate has generated much excitement in art circles. Backed by Stuart Shave from London’s Modern Art, Sami is certainly the painter to follow in the next years.