Untitled Miami Beach
4 - 8 December 2024
Booth A22
Sam Samiee & Alan Hernández

No Man’s Art Gallery is honoured to present a duo booth at Untitled Miami 2024 by Iranian painter and essayist Sam Samiee and Mexican visual artist Alan Hernández. The presentation offers perspectives on queer aesthetics, the (male) body, fluidity, art history, decor (as discourse) and sensuality through painting and soft sculptures.

Alan Hernández (b.1992, MX) based in Oaxaca, Mexico is known for his self-referential work that contains a certain political charge and humor. He graduated in plastic and visual arts at the Benito Juárez autonomous university of Oaxaca, U.A.B.J.O and studied at the art faculties of the UNAM and the U.A.E.M. His production focuses on intricate textile and bead techniques that trace back to crafts from his region, which are transformed to installations and immersive scenographies. Through this, he explores concepts as the body, gender, race, sexuality and identity. His knowledge of the various textile crafts is inspired and enforced by his mother, who was a seamstress herself. Hernández uses his artisthood as a means to rethink his role as a (queer) male within society. His processes start from a central idea and unconsciously these ideas are nuanced and transformed along with the formality of the piece to generate sculptural objects with phallic and organic shapes drawn from nature and the human body.

Sam Samiee (b. 1988, IR) is a painter, essayist and psychoanalyst in training based in Amsterdam, Berlin and Tehran. He finished the Rijksakademie residency in 2015 and ArtEZ University of Arts and Design in 2013, where he was a lecturer of painting until 2020. His primary education in arts began at the University of Arts in Tehran. Samiee synthesises his heavy research on art history, Persian poetry and psychoanalytic theories into a studio practice that employs painting in multiple registers. The characteristic of his installations as extended paintings is the break from the tradition of flat painting and a return to the original question of how artists can represent the three- dimensional world in the space of painting as a metaphor for a set of ideas. He employs a range of painterly attitudes from oil paintings to iPad paintings, figuration, abstraction, the break of the rectangular frame and usage of text among other methods. Recently Samiee’s work focuses on a period of painting that parted ways from avant-garde, with the emphasis on decorative modes of work, of artists such as Matisse and Bonnard.