Sami Briss (Born 1930) Romanian, Signed and Numbered Abstract Silkscreen Print. Depicts figures in the foreground with a cat, bird, and fish, with a Middle Eastern town atop sand dunes in the distance. Signed in white pen bottom right. Numbered 8/95 in white pen bottom left. 

Overall Size: 36 1/2 x 29 in. 

Sight Size: 21 x 17 in. 

Sami Briss was born in Jassy, Romania in 1930. From an early age he was interested in art, influenced by both the peaceful, rolling beauty of the surrounding landscape and the stately, imposing architecture of his home city. His mother, a dressmaker, encouraged his interest in the arts, and helped him enter the Beaux-Arts of Bucharest. He first worked on still lifes, showing a fascination with creating oblique constructions out of everyday objects. He experimented with lithography and wood cutting, but by the early 1960s he was devoted almost solely to painting in oils and watercolors. A chance meeting with an elderly folk artist led him to study the art of iconography, using the ancient techniques to imbue new materials and motifs into his work. Much of his pieces focused on symbolist subjects, particularly Slavic folklore and Biblical imagery, but as he grew older he began to explore more surrealist concepts. In the late 1970s, seeking to escape from the turmoil slowly destroying Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime, he fled to Paris, France, and began to divide his time between ateliers there and in Tel Aviv. The ancient architecture of his adopted home and the beautiful desolation of the Middle Eastern deserts further influenced his work, and from the 2000s onward he frequently chose to focus on portraiture, creating abstract figural images that incorporate all of his many experiences under Communism and his later freedom in the West. His paintings are found in many private and public collections throughout Europe and America, with the largest exhibition of his work in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.