Sam Samore cultivates mystery as others cultivate light. Since the 1970s, he has built a hypnotic body of work, haunted by beauty, oblivion, and fiction. With an exhibition dedicated to him this autumn at the Thomas Brambilla Gallery, his world, both romantic and enigmatic, resonates more than ever with our image-saturated era.
An artist who is both elusive and profoundly consistent, Sam Samore has been developing a body of work at the margins of photography, cinema, and narrative for five decades. Born in 1953, and living between New York, Paris, and Bangkok, he draws on psychology, crime fiction, and mythology to blur the lines between fiction and reality, appearance and disappearance.
His images are traps. They resemble film fragments, stolen moments from a narrative that never existed. Since his beginnings with The Suicidist (1973), he explored the figure of the antihero, an inglorious character, often frozen in a moment of bewilderment or waiting. His series from the 1980s and 1990s (situations, Allegories of Beauty) decline these motifs in an enigmatic way, between psychological tension and icy elegance.
There is in his work a stubborn refusal of any resolution. In his photos, as in those of his series Scenarios (2007), each scene seems to foreshadow a drama or a revelation… that never comes. The image is suspended, the story aborted. The viewer is left facing a fiction that eludes them, invited to project their own fantasies.
Through this deliberate ambiguity, he opposes images saturated with explanation and immediate seduction. Far from the codified heroines of Cindy Sherman, Samore evokes instead the absent faces of Antonioni, or the ellipses of Godard. Cinema and literature permeate his visual language: his photographs are chapters without a book, his videos unfinished narrative poems.
Her work has been shown in the most demanding venues: from MoMA PS1 to the Fondation Cartier, from the Kunsthalle Zürich to the Venice Biennale. But it remains discreet, almost clandestine, as if she never sought to impose herself. Shunning definitive pronouncements, Samore prefers to suggest, insinuate, evoke absence rather than explicitness.
He is also a writer, author of several collections of short stories, as elliptical as his images. This taste for the fragment, for silence, for the fragmented story, runs through all his work, whatever the medium.
In the fall of 2025, the Thomas Brambilla gallery in Bergamo will dedicate a solo exhibition to him. A rare opportunity to immerse oneself in the world of an artist who has always preferred the shadows to the light.
“Schizophrenic Beauty (Continued)”
Thomas Brambilla Gallery
Via Casalino 25, Bergamo (Italy)
From October 4 to December 5, 2025
