Sami Briss

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Educated at the Bucharest School of Fine Arts in Camil Ressu’s studio, Sami Briss developed a visual language that merges the discipline of academic training with the imaginative sensibility of an artist shaped by exile. After leaving Romania in 1960, he settled in Israel, where encounters with Marcel Janco and the Dadaist milieu oriented his work toward a synthesis of modernist experimentation and symbolic figuration. His first solo exhibition took place in Tel Aviv in 1967, marking the start of an international trajectory that included shows in France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, the United States, and Canada. Throughout his career, Briss has combined painting, printmaking, and relief sculpture, often working with mosaic or carved wooden panels integrated into architectural settings. His compositions - built on subdued chromatic harmonies of ochre and blue—feature simplified figures rendered on flat, luminous surfaces, recalling both Byzantine iconography and the stylised innocence of children’s drawings. The hieratic stillness of his characters, anchored in archaic ritual and biblical reference, imbues his work with a quiet spiritual resonance, free from narrative excess. Briss’s works are represented in public and private collections across Europe, Israel, and North America, including the Jewish Museum in New York, the Palm Springs Desert Museum, and the National Museum of Art in Bucharest. Since the mid-1970s, he has lived and worked in Paris, maintaining a practice that bridges the memory of Eastern European modernism with the decorative austerity of post-war European art.