‘I hide the traumatic image behind a cactus or carpet’ – the paintings of Iraqi exile Mohammed Sami

As a schoolboy, he painted propaganda murals for Saddam Hussein’s regime. Now, as the rising star prepares for his first solo UK show, he reveals what triggers his powerful work

Mohammed Sami can never anticipate what the subject of his next painting will be.“The things I articulate in my artwork are memories hidden in the brain cells that are waiting for a trigger,” the Iraqi-born artist says in his London studio, which is lined with large-scale paintings. “So whenever the trigger is available, then the image comes.”

He points to one titled Slaughtered Sun, a figure of speech in Arabic to describe sunset. A burnt orange sky casts an unearthly glow over wheat fields gouged by heavy purple furrows – they could be tractor tracks, but the blood-red pools in the foreground hint at latent violence. “I was drinking coffee and I saw bike tracks on a puddle in London,” Sami says. “This connected me immediately with the tracks of American tanks during the 2003 invasion and the flattened fields.”

The artist, who emigrated to Sweden in 2007 as a refugee, was a standout of last year’s exhibition Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward in London and the 2020 Towner Eastbourne’s biennial. This month he has his first major UK solo show, at Modern Art in London.

Sami’s paintings are generally devoid of figures but nonetheless have a human presence, whether he is depicting claustrophobic domestic interiors, haunting landscapes or charged ordinary objects. A shadow of a spider plant can metamorphose into an ominous invader, or chairs in a parliamentary hall become a vast graveyard. Rife with ambivalence, mimicking the unreliability of memory, Sami’s hallucinatory paintings have a way of getting under the skin. One huge canvas, actually titled Skin, portrays human-size pink and red patterned rolls that resemble carpets or leather-bound tomes, and yet the horror of flayed flesh simultaneously comes to mind.

“This is the type of signifier I use to hide the traumatic image behind something entirely different, like a cactus or the carpet on the floor,” Sami explains. “This helps to distract you from the main subject matter, which is trauma and conflict.” In Arab culture, he says, euphemism and allegory are used as “a delusive strategy to not let the authorities understand what we’re saying”.

Born in Baghdad in 1984 under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, Sami lived through the Iran-Iraq conflict, two Gulf wars, the US-led invasion and sectarian violence. He shared a 100 sq metre house with six brothers, three sisters and their parents. An exquisitely rendered painting of chipboards blocking a window conjures their existence with eloquent economy. Titled 23 Years of Night, it refers to Sami’s life growing up with windows barricaded against bombs – and yet the net curtains are embroidered with delicate stars, mitigating the bleakness.

Sami’s mother, an amateur artist, was the only family member to encourage his talent. Being dyslexic, he struck a deal at school to paint monumental propaganda murals in exchange for passing in maths and English. That experience accounts for the ambitious scale of his paintings, he says. At home he studied Islamic miniatures for want of other art books, which helps explain the jarring perspectival compositions of his paintings: compartmentalised interiors with doors that might open inward or outward, floors rearing upwards, horizons abruptly sliced across.

Following Saddam’s overthrow Sami spent a fraught stint working at the Ministry of Culture helping to recover artworks looted from the Iraq Museum, until an embassy contact helped him obtain asylum in Sweden. Several paintings titled Refugee Camp depict a house set deep within fenced woods, which we might be tempted to read as sinister. Sami, however, describes his stay there as “the most beautiful days in my life. It was a school of freedom where you’re free to pick your identity.” He returns there every month. “It was a shock,” he says. “You live in dust and deserts with the sound of bullets. And suddenly you open your eyes to gardens like heaven.”

That said, Sweden proved too staid for Sami, and he left to pursue his artistic training, first at Ulster University in Belfast, then at Goldsmiths in London. It provoked a complete shift in his work as he gave up reproducing scenes of war, instead mining his memories to evoke an underlying sense of disquiet.

Sami never takes photographs or makes sketches. He works on several canvases at once. Titles and motifs recur, giving the impression that his paintings are engaged in a never-ending conversation. It can take months for the triggers to happen. He tries to prompt them by reading Arabic literature. At other times, the memories “fall fluidly, like rain from heaven and I stay in the studio for 17 hours”.

While his paintings are freighted with personal memories they are ambiguous enough to invite multiple associations. It’s impossible to see Execution Room, with its glossy table and gilded chairs, without being reminded of the lavish, sterile hall where Vladimir Putin has met world leaders to discuss his war on Ukraine. “What type of decisions are being made in these rooms?” Sami asks. “I’ve learnt that the power of invisibility is much more powerful than the power of visibility.”

• Mohammed Sami is at Modern Art, London, from 23 March to 7 May

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