Mohammed Sami

Mohammed Sami was born in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1984 and came of age during the Gulf Wars and the subsequent Iraq conflict, experiences that would become the central subject of his painting. He studied drawing and painting at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad, completing his studies in 2005, and worked for a period at the Iraqi Ministry of Culture before leaving Iraq for Sweden in 2007.

In the UK, Sami earned a BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Belfast School of Art, Ulster University, a degree that sources date to either 2015 or 2016, and went on to complete an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2018. He settled in London, where he lives and works today. Some earlier gallery biographies also listed Norrkoping, Sweden, as an additional base, while more recent sources describe London as his sole base.

Sami's paintings are large, acrylic-on-canvas works that depict domestic and institutional interiors, often stripped of human figures, in which absence itself becomes a record of violence, surveillance, and displacement. His institutional profile accelerated sharply from 2022 onward, with inclusion in the 2022 Aichi Triennale in Japan and a solo exhibition at Camden Art Centre in London (2023), culminating in a major solo presentation, After the Storm, at Blenheim Palace in 2024. That exhibition led to his shortlisting for the 2025 Turner Prize, with the nomination exhibition shown at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford from September 2025 to February 2026.

Institutional recognition for Sami has arrived quickly and from a broad range of major museums. His work entered the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Moderna Museet, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Government Art Collection, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others, within roughly a decade of his graduate studies. His inclusion in the 2022 Aichi Triennale and his 2024 solo exhibition at Blenheim Palace, organized by the Blenheim Art Foundation, were followed by his shortlisting for the 2025 Turner Prize, one of only four artists nominated that year. The critical framing across galleries and institutions consistently centers on his use of empty, memory-laden interiors to carry the weight of war and exile drawn from his own experience of Iraq's conflicts. No verbatim assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is quoted here.

Sami's auction market is young, active, and not yet fully transparent in public records. The clearest confirmed result is During the Journey (2015), which sold for USD 241,400 at Bonhams' Post-War and Contemporary Art Online sale on 27 June 2024, 125 percent above its low estimate. Separately, the aggregator MutualArt cites a highest reported auction price of about USD 952,500 for a work titled The Praying Room, said to have sold at Sotheby's New York in 2023; the exact calendar date has not been located in available public summaries, so it should be treated as a widely repeated market figure with the date unconfirmed. HENI estimates roughly USD 4.68 million in cumulative auction turnover over the trailing four years, with Artprice counting 18 public auction appearances in total, almost all paintings. Sami is represented by Luhring Augustine in New York and Modern Art in London.

Sami's auction history is short and, in places, imprecisely documented in public sources: only a handful of confirmed lots exist, the highest widely cited figure lacks a confirmed exact sale date, and there is no published catalogue raisonne. His representation by Luhring Augustine and Modern Art, together with acquisitions by major museums on both sides of the Atlantic, is the strongest signal of durability. Because the market is so new, collectors should expect individual sale results to be more volatile and less predictive than for artists with a longer trading history, and should verify any specific transaction through the auction house of record rather than through secondary market summaries.