ARTIST STATEMENT
Kamran Samimi's stone-centered practice questions how meaning both accrues and dissolves within material objects that persist beyond their maker. His Iranian-Norwegian heritage and upbringing in rural Hawai'i inform a sustained attention to in-betweenness from geographic, cultural, and cosmological, that structures his approach to human and non-human worlds.
Rooted in a reverence for nature drawn from Hawaiian, Zen Buddhist, and Sufi frameworks, his practice treats materiality as a portal to the unseen undercurrent that binds all things. Samimi's direct, deliberate approach moves across scales and surfaces, from fluid brush paintings to monumental stone forms, circling back to the question: what does it mean to experience material?
Through carving, painting, fracture, and reconfiguration, his process navigates the non dual interplay of creation and destruction, addressing the deeply human pull between attachment and letting go. Each artwork becomes a meditation on, and mediation of, mortality in a world in flux.
Kamran is represented by The Third Line (Middle East / North Africa) and re.riddle (San Francisco Bay Area)
Photo by Micheal Young
BIO
Kamran Samimi grew up in rural Laupāhoehoe on Hawaiʻi Island to parents of Iranian and Norwegian ancestry. He has been exhibiting art since 2008, and has had solo exhibitions at The Third Line, Dubai, the Sharjah Art Museum in United Arab Emirates, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design.
His work is in the permanent collection of Michelle and Barack Obama, Mohammad Afkhami, the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, and the Hawai’i State Foundation of Culture and the Arts. Samimi was the recipient of the 2024 Artists of Hawai’i Best In Show Award and holds an BFA in Printmaking and an MFA in Print Media and Sculpture from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He has gallery representation by The Third Line in Dubai and re.riddle in San Francisco.