Mohammed Sami on His Vicious Circles

The Turner Prize-nominated artist returns with charged works of turmoil and trauma for a new solo show at Modern Art, Paris

Mohammed Sami’s paintings, with their dexterous manipulation of light, scale and perspective, have a way of transforming before our eyes. Looking at Nothing Is Empty (2025), one of the new works on display as part of his new solo show Vicious Circles at Modern Art, Paris, a viewer’s thought process might go something like this: “Are those stray bullets lolling around a shadowy city corner? No, they’re too big to be bullets. Actually, that isn’t a city wall, it’s the inside of a cardboard box. And I’m inside the box, and those bullets are lipstick holders. Or maybe that is a city wall, and the giant lipstick-bullets are a metaphor for the vanity of war. Or capitalism?” 

Sami very rarely does interviews. But in a conversation with fellow artist Rachel Whiteread, the Iraqi-born artist breaks it down. “Formal representation is the main trap with which I draw viewers into my work.” Sami’s may be more of a household name since his 2025 Turner Prize nomination (for his sweeping show, After the Storm, staged at Blenheim Palace), but his ability to harness the formal aspects of painting is decades in the making. Starting with five years of intensive classical training at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad, he graduated from the Belfast School of Art in 2016, before completing his MFA at Goldsmiths, London – the city where he now lives. He uses a variety of mediums alongside acrylics and oils, adding depth and texture by mixing sand and concrete directly into his paints. And while he readily acknowledges that growing up during Saddam Hussein’s rule, and leaving his country to land at a refugee camp in Sweden, are life events that influence his perspective, he is wary of reductionist interpretations. 

“As an Iraqi painter, the media expects me to talk about my personal experiences in Iraq or to create artworks that are associated with politics and chaos,” he said to Whiteread. “They tend to ignore any intellectual discussion in order to emphasise the idea of victims of war, which serves both left- and right-wing policies in the West.” 

Another new work on display, Vicious Circles II (2025), looks like an exploding supernova, or the rainbow effect from oil spreading across water. Does Sami’s geographical origins consolidate meaning? What about the origins of each of us viewers? Maybe it’s all just an artistic game. “There is a good amount of delusion and trickery in the delivery of a painting that complicates the way a work operates visually,” he says. But there’s more than knife’s-edge novelty at play; no matter how many times I see the staggering 3x6-metre Refugee Camp (2022), currently on view at Tate Britain, I halt in my tracks. The work has staying power in great part because it both captures and elicits the flash sensation when a past conflict overwhelms the present with such force that we can’t escape its grasp. “Memories do not return as we expect, as palm trees or people struggling in the street, or something like that,” he told art critic Hettie Judah in 2023. “Returning memories masquerade in light and shadow, and windows, or in some everyday object.” 

A moment of temporal mingling can happen at the most incidental of times, while our instincts are honed to register it as a threat. It’s not déjà vu, he says, but another type of universal experience: “I think more of triggers.” Drawing on a personal bank of recollections, fragments, and impressions, the artist builds scenes with a catastrophising sensibility, distorting realities with all the weird, sinister, sometimes cartoonish lighting, shapes and angles that we will swear are real when an activated nervous system senses danger and is looking for an out. 

Witnessing Sami’s pictures is to share in the painter’s incidents of triggering, while simultaneously accessing our own recollections of survival mode-driven cognitive processing; those physiologically drenched moments when old trauma re-punches a hole in the wall of quotidian life. The sustained visceral scenes in Sami’s work are like enactments of the oft-referenced advice once given to him by Luc Tuymans: “Paint the sound of the bullet, not the bullet” – the Belgian artist’s more elegant way of saying show, don’t tell.

For Sami, all of this – memory, trauma, triggering, universality, specificity – comes back to the question of what painting can do. “To be a painter, you need to understand the limitation and the capacity of painting as a practice. Since the invention of photographs and the moving image, the capacity of painting has shrunk significantly. You don’t have much left to do. Which might be unpleasant for many painters, but it’s good for me, because it gives me the opportunity to articulate what is left in the elements of paintings: objects, atmosphere, things you can’t depict very easily in photography or film.” It’s a sagacious, even optimistic recognition of what humans can achieve that machines cannot – a sentiment that couldn’t come at a better time. 

Mohammed Sami: Vicious Circles is at Modern Art, Place de l’Alma, Paris until 27 June 2026.