Sam Samiee is an Iranian painter, visual artist, essayist and educator based in Amsterdam and Tehran. His works are influenced by his research into Persian poetry and into the Islamic custom of Adab- synthesizing ethics and aesthetics- as well as war, the masculine body and psychoanalysis. Combining multiple paintings to create layered installations, Samiee interrogates the limits of 2D medium in representing the 3D world, the canvas remains, but its location within a composite unit becomes unclear. Despite his paintings’ figurative appearance, the artist’s background is in mathematics and engineering and his work has a rigorous conceptual underpinning which he attributes to a Persian culture of poetry and conceptualism. Interrogating the roles of symbols and iconography in his paintings and in the European painting tradition, Samiee seeks to undo the domination of a Eurocentric worldview, queering normative order and integrating histories of the East.