Image: Lis Sam, work from the ‘Metamorphosis’ series. FREMIN GALLERY, New York
Fremin Gallery will present ‘Metamorphosis’, a solo exhibition by Lis Sam, at its ground-floor space at 520 West 23rd Street in New York from September 10 through October 31, 2026. An opening reception is scheduled for Thursday, September 10 at 6 p.m. The gallery has shown Sam before: its exhibitions archive lists the two-person presentation ‘Float Like a Butterfly’, with Lisa Meek, from April 10 to May 31, 2025.
Born in Tunisia in 1989 and raised in France, Sam is a self-taught artist whose route into art ran through street art and a background in craftsmanship. He works across photography, floral sculpture and digital composition, and the gallery frames the exhibition around transformation, femininity and the relationship between people and the natural world.
The gallery traces the work to a visit to a butterfly greenhouse in southern France, where the movement of butterflies among flowers suggested feminine forms emerging from their wings. The butterfly became a recurring motif standing for growth, fragility and continual change. On its exhibition page the gallery calls the group of works the ‘Blossoming Girls’ series, while its biography of the artist describes the new series as ‘Metamorphosis’.
Each image begins as a physical construction rather than a photograph. Sam assembles floral installations and handcrafted botanical headdresses in the studio, envelops or partly conceals the figure within them, and photographs the result; the arrangements are temporary and survive only as images.
The gallery presents nature in this work as material and metaphor rather than subject, and describes the pictures as sitting between portraiture and installation — dreamlike settings in which the figure merges with plant life and questions of beauty, identity and impermanence come to the surface.
The works listed for the exhibition are made in photography on paper with plexiglass and run from roughly 39 by 39 inches to 59 by 59 inches, at depths of five to six inches. Titles include ‘Jardin Secret 2’, ‘Sous Les Pétales Roses 4’, ‘Sous Les Pétales d’Hiver 2’ and ‘Sous Les Pétales d’Hiver 3’, ‘Flore 4’, ‘Autumn Shadow’ and ‘Shadow’. Prices are on request.
