About

Sam Grigorian studied at the Yerevan State Art Academy from 1974 to 1977. Through the late 1970s and the 1980s he worked in Armenia, at the State Gallery of Armenia and the Museum of Modern Art in Yerevan, before the political conditions of the late Soviet period drew him westward.

In 1992 he relocated to Berlin, where the studio has been continuously located since. The first decade in Berlin, through the late 1990s, produced primarily small and intimate works on handmade paper. By the early 2000s the work had grown in scale and ambition, culminating in Old Story, the twelve-year work that anchors the practice.

In 2002 his work was shown at Galerie De Rijk in The Hague alongside Antoni Tàpies, Karel Appel, and Pierre Alechinsky. The placement made a claim about where the work belongs: in conversation with the post-war European masters of the gestural and the worked surface, pushing that conversation toward the limits of paper as a medium.

Subsequent exhibitions have placed him in Paris (Musée du Luxembourg, 2007), in the Netherlands (Holland Paper Biennial, 2010), and culminated in his 2024 solo exhibition at the Stiftung Reinbeckhallen, Berlin, a substantial institutional presentation centered on Old Story.

Works are held in the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Armenia, the Stiftung Reinbeckhallen Collection, and further private and corporate collections.

Sam works principally in décollage, on a variety of intimate paper formats. The works of the 2010s and 2020s — the Happiness, City, Behind the Fence, and Untitled groups — share the same procedural ground: paper made, layered, scraped, recovered. The hand that does not complete, that scrapes instead, keeps faith with what cannot be recovered by marking the place where it was.