Sami Mohammad

Sami Mohammad Ahmad Al-Saleh was born in Kuwait on 1 October 1943, in the Al-Sawaber area of Sharq. His father was a tailor. As a child he liked playing with clay, making forms that looked like birds and animals and selling them to his friends. While a pupil at Sabah School he helped to make statues for a school project commemorating the battles of Port Said and Port Fouad, and at the opening of the display he was given first prize by Sheikh Abdullah Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, then head of the education department.

From 1960 he trained with the Egyptian sculptor Anwar Al-Serougy. Around the age of 20 he left school and took a job at the Ministry of Interior, and in 1962 he joined the newly founded Free Atelier, which offered materials and tuition free of charge. The Ministry of Education granted him a lifelong stipend and studio space there. In those years he read widely about Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Bernini, whose example shaped his early life-size figures.

In 1966 he received a government scholarship to study at the College of Fine Arts in Cairo, completing his degree in 1970. In 1974 he went to the United States, spending time first in Vermont improving his English and then studying at the Johnson Atelier, a sculpture institute in Princeton, New Jersey, where he began working in bronze casting. He returned to Kuwait in 1976.

In 1967 Sami Mohammad was one of the founders of the Kuwaiti Society for Formative Arts. His early works included life-size figures such as Ibn Rushd (1964), The Sailor (1964), Al-Khalil bin Ahmad (1965) and Mother (1968). In 1970 he made Hunger, a mother and child reduced to skin and bone, and in 1971 he received a national prize diploma at the international painters' festival in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France. The same year the newspaper Al-Aam commissioned his bronze statue of Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salem Al-Sabah, ruler of Kuwait from 1950 to 1965, which was completed in 1972. He later made a statue of Sheikh Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah.

After his return from the United States he worked on the series Before Birth, After Birth and Motherhood, represented Kuwait at an exhibition of Kuwaiti artists in Paris in 1978 and attended the tenth International Sculpture Conference in Toronto. He then began the Boxes series in 1979, figures confined and struggling inside boxes, which became his best known body of work. Sabra and Shatila (1983), a blindfolded, bound figure on a block, responded to the massacre in Beirut and was later the subject of academic study. Other works included Paralysis and Resistance (1980), The Challenge (1983), The Tied Man (1989), The Earthquake (1990) and the Shackled and Call for Help series of ink drawings.

He won first prize at the first Cairo International Biennial in 1984, and first prizes at the Kuwait General Exhibition and the Gulf Cooperation Council art biennial in 1988. His first travelling exhibition opened in Sharjah in 1994 and went on to Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Italy. He published a bilingual book, The Art of Sami Mohammad, in 1995, and closed his studio at the Free Atelier in 1999.

The National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters commissioned him to design the State of Kuwait Merit Award trophy and the gold medal and trophy of the National Achievement Award. In the early 2000s the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sharjah dedicated a wing to his work. In 2013 his statues of the two Sheikhs were shown in National Works, curated by Ala Younis, at Kuwait's first pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. His sculpture The Sidra stands in Dubai. He received Kuwait's State Incentive Award in 1999, the Arab Thought Foundation's award for artistic creativity in 2010 and the State Appreciation Award in 2015.

Sami Mohammad spent his life in Kuwait apart from his years of study in Cairo and the United States. He had three sons, Osama, Bashar and Mohammad. In a 2018 interview with Selections magazine he spoke about his studio and the influences on his work. Little else about his private life has been published.

On 10 August 2026 his son Bashar told the newspaper Al-Jarida that his father had suffered a severe health crisis and was in intensive care in a coma after an operation to remove his bowel. He said his father had returned from medical treatment in London about three weeks earlier and had seemed to be stable before his condition suddenly worsened.

Sami Mohammad died on the evening of Tuesday 11 August 2026, at the age of 82, after failing to respond to treatment. The General Secretariat of the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters mourned him, recalling a career of more than six decades and his part in founding the Kuwaiti art movement. In Egypt, Mahmoud Hamed, head of the Fine Arts Sector, also paid tribute.

He was buried on Wednesday 12 August 2026 at the Jaafari cemetery after the sunset prayer, in the presence of fellow artists and admirers of his work.

Sami Mohammad is widely regarded as one of the most important artists Kuwait has produced and a pioneer of sculpture in the Gulf. Critics in the Arab press described him as an artist deeply involved in the human saga, and the Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra said his works deserved to stand in the halls of the United Nations and UNESCO.

His sculptures remain in Kuwaiti collections, in the long-term display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sharjah and in public space in Dubai, and his work has been the subject of several academic studies, including papers on Sabra and Shatila and on the Prometheus myth in his sculpture. The trophies he designed are still presented as Kuwait's national awards.