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Lot Essay
In My Son’s Clothes III, Mohammed Sami transforms an ordinary domestic scene into an image charged with absence. Clothes hang neatly across multiple washing lines above a tiled courtyard, while the faint outline of a bicycle and its shadow remains on the ground below. No human figure appears within the scene, leaving the painting suspended between presence and disappearance. At first glance, the composition is rooted in the familiar routines of family life; yet, as is characteristic of Sami’s practice, this apparent familiarity conceals a narrative that remains unresolved.
The composition is subtly unsettled by the tilted perspective of the courtyard, disrupting conventional spatial orientation and introducing a sense of instability. Sami frequently employs skewed viewpoints and dislocated spatial relationships to create environments that unsettle ordinary orientation. Here, the slant of the tiled ground suggests a world subtly out of balance, while the garments appear translucent, their pale greens, whites, and faded reds dissolving into the surrounding light. Some seem almost to merge with the sky itself, as though slowly fading from view. Rather than functioning simply as items of clothing, they become fragile traces of human presence with their weathered appearance suggesting long-term exposure. The abandoned bicycle carries a similar sense of human presence, while also marking an interruption: its presence implies movement that has ceased, its shadow echoing the tones of the hanging fabrics and creating a quiet visual correspondence between the objects. Rather than resolving into a single narrative, these details accumulate fragments, allowing associations to emerge indirectly.
Although the scene is outdoors, the courtyard functions as an extension of the home and remains closely connected to notions of intimacy and care. Washing clothes, caring for children and maintaining a domestic environment are private acts, and the neatly arranged garments suggest a continuing attentiveness to family life. The bicycles, meanwhile, carry associations of childhood play and freedom. Within Sami’s broader engagement with conflict, migration and displacement, these ordinary objects acquire a deeper resonance. They suggest the persistence of everyday life and the creation of fragile spaces of familiarity and protection amid instability.
Memory is central to Sami’s practice. Drawing on his experiences in Iraq and the enduring effects of migration, he constructs spaces that are at once personal and collective, evoking memory as fragmented, displaced and often attached to sensations rather than coherent narratives. The garments in My Son’s Clothes III become traces of lives temporarily absent, preserving a sense of human presence without depicting it. This relationship between presence and absence reflects what Sami has described as ‘thereness’: the sensation of being unexpectedly transported to another place or time through a fleeting visual encounter. The painting consequently occupies an uncertain space between the present and an inaccessible past, between familiarity and estrangement.
Sami has spoken of drawing on ‘collective memories’ rather than illustrating specific historical events. Familiar objects become repositories of shared experience, capable of suggesting narratives without explicitly recounting them. In My Son’s Clothes III, the empty courtyard, the unattended laundry and the abandoned bicycle carry traces of a story that remains unseen. The work therefore avoids representing violence directly, instead allowing its implications to emerge through what is absent. Sami creates an image that feels at once specific and collective, transforming the details of a particular domestic space into a quietly haunting meditation on memory itself: how it persists, fragments and fades, while continuing to shape our understanding of home long after the moment has passed. In this quiet suspension between what is visible and what is withheld, ordinary objects become vessels for loss, belonging and the enduring imprint of lived experience.
Mohammed Sami was born in Baghdad in 1984, and lives and works in London. Having completed studies at the Institute of Fine Arts, Baghdad, he worked at the Ministry of Culture before emigrating to Sweden in 2007. Sami graduated from Belfast School of Art in 2015, and earned an MFA at Goldsmiths College, London, in 2018. He has been named Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London, for 2027, and was a nominee for the Turner Prize 2025.
Sami’s recent solo exhibitions include Fire Exit at KM21, The Hague, and To Whom It May Concern at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (both 2025); After the Storm at Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, and Isthmus at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (both 2024), and The Point 0 at Camden Art Centre, London (2023). His paintings are held in prominent collections including the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Arts Council Collection, London; Tate, London; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MAMCO, Geneva; and Pinault Collection, Venice and Paris.
The composition is subtly unsettled by the tilted perspective of the courtyard, disrupting conventional spatial orientation and introducing a sense of instability. Sami frequently employs skewed viewpoints and dislocated spatial relationships to create environments that unsettle ordinary orientation. Here, the slant of the tiled ground suggests a world subtly out of balance, while the garments appear translucent, their pale greens, whites, and faded reds dissolving into the surrounding light. Some seem almost to merge with the sky itself, as though slowly fading from view. Rather than functioning simply as items of clothing, they become fragile traces of human presence with their weathered appearance suggesting long-term exposure. The abandoned bicycle carries a similar sense of human presence, while also marking an interruption: its presence implies movement that has ceased, its shadow echoing the tones of the hanging fabrics and creating a quiet visual correspondence between the objects. Rather than resolving into a single narrative, these details accumulate fragments, allowing associations to emerge indirectly.
Although the scene is outdoors, the courtyard functions as an extension of the home and remains closely connected to notions of intimacy and care. Washing clothes, caring for children and maintaining a domestic environment are private acts, and the neatly arranged garments suggest a continuing attentiveness to family life. The bicycles, meanwhile, carry associations of childhood play and freedom. Within Sami’s broader engagement with conflict, migration and displacement, these ordinary objects acquire a deeper resonance. They suggest the persistence of everyday life and the creation of fragile spaces of familiarity and protection amid instability.
Memory is central to Sami’s practice. Drawing on his experiences in Iraq and the enduring effects of migration, he constructs spaces that are at once personal and collective, evoking memory as fragmented, displaced and often attached to sensations rather than coherent narratives. The garments in My Son’s Clothes III become traces of lives temporarily absent, preserving a sense of human presence without depicting it. This relationship between presence and absence reflects what Sami has described as ‘thereness’: the sensation of being unexpectedly transported to another place or time through a fleeting visual encounter. The painting consequently occupies an uncertain space between the present and an inaccessible past, between familiarity and estrangement.
Sami has spoken of drawing on ‘collective memories’ rather than illustrating specific historical events. Familiar objects become repositories of shared experience, capable of suggesting narratives without explicitly recounting them. In My Son’s Clothes III, the empty courtyard, the unattended laundry and the abandoned bicycle carry traces of a story that remains unseen. The work therefore avoids representing violence directly, instead allowing its implications to emerge through what is absent. Sami creates an image that feels at once specific and collective, transforming the details of a particular domestic space into a quietly haunting meditation on memory itself: how it persists, fragments and fades, while continuing to shape our understanding of home long after the moment has passed. In this quiet suspension between what is visible and what is withheld, ordinary objects become vessels for loss, belonging and the enduring imprint of lived experience.
Mohammed Sami was born in Baghdad in 1984, and lives and works in London. Having completed studies at the Institute of Fine Arts, Baghdad, he worked at the Ministry of Culture before emigrating to Sweden in 2007. Sami graduated from Belfast School of Art in 2015, and earned an MFA at Goldsmiths College, London, in 2018. He has been named Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London, for 2027, and was a nominee for the Turner Prize 2025.
Sami’s recent solo exhibitions include Fire Exit at KM21, The Hague, and To Whom It May Concern at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (both 2025); After the Storm at Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, and Isthmus at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (both 2024), and The Point 0 at Camden Art Centre, London (2023). His paintings are held in prominent collections including the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Arts Council Collection, London; Tate, London; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MAMCO, Geneva; and Pinault Collection, Venice and Paris.