Samy Briss is a French-Israeli painter, engraver and sculptor born on May 18, 1930 in Iași, Romania. Without affiliation with any pictorial school, his work is imbued with surrealism and neo-primitivism.
Samy Briss was born on May 18, 1930 in Iași, then the Romanian capital of Moldova, into a lower-middle-class Jewish family. His father, Sapsi Briss, worked for the Philips company and his mother Ester Winter ran a small haute couture workshop. During the Second World War, he suffered deprivation, but paradoxically recognized that institutional anti-Semitism, which excluded Jewish teachers from schools, high schools and universities, allowed him to benefit from the greatest professors.
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In 1949, encouraged by his mother, he entered the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest and gave up a career as a sports journalist. Between 1950 and 1954, he attended the studio of the painter Camil Ressu and made his first posters and engravings. Between 1955 and 1957, he participated in various exhibitions of graphic art and painting. He created theater sets and costumes and worked as an assistant in the scenography class of the Theater Institute of Bucharest.
In 1957, he exhibited for the first time at the Triennale of Engraving in Switzerland, where he represented Romania. In 1958, Samy Briss, like many Romanian intellectuals, was a victim of the wave of repression organized by the communist regime. His first painting exhibition in Bucharest was banned.
In 1959, Samy Briss left Romania with his family. After a long journey through Europe, he settled in Israel in 1960. There he met the co-founder of the Dada movement, Marcel Janco, a fruitful friendship that would determine the rest of his career.
In 1960, he married the architect Ruth Schafer, who died in 1980. From 1961 to 1966, he created numerous works for public buildings and Israeli institutions, and was invited to the International Poster Biennale in Warsaw. In 1967, he exhibited for the first time in Tel Aviv, on the advice of the sculptor Dani Karavan. From 1968 to 1970, he participated in several group exhibitions in Israel and abroad.
In 1971, Samy Briss made his first contact with the Parisian gallery Romanet. The following year, in 1972, he held his first exhibitions in Paris and the United States. In 1974, Samy Briss settled permanently in Paris.
In 1980, he met the Dutch painter and sculptor Miriam Speet in Maastricht, whom he married in 1985. The couple gave birth to two sons, Boris in 1986 and Simon in 1988. Since 2013, he has divided his time between Paris and his studio in Chateauneuf-de-Gadagne in Vaucluse. He was named Honorary Citizen of the Commune of Chateauneuf-de-Gadagne in 2019 and Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres the same year. In 2023, he also became Honorary Citizen of the City of Iași in Romania.
The poet Frédéric Jacques Temple wrote in L'imagier de la mémoire, a book dedicated to the artist: "he took with him Moldavia, its songs, its proverbs, the frescoes of its monasteries, the brilliance of peasant ceramics [...] the green and pink heights of Jerusalem, the flamboyant silence of the desert, the polychrome rocks and palm trees of the land of the Book [...]". Jean-Marie Tasset in Le Figaro said of him: "the capture of dream and poetry [...] the hieratic characters seem immaterial and stand out against blue, ochre, golden backgrounds that have the sumptuousness of icons [...]". For the magazine L'Œil, Samy Briss "mixes the sacred and the profane and results in a very personal style of poetic and mythical symbolism that brings an intriguing mystery." For Marcel Janco, "the technique and colors, inspired by Byzantine iconography are extremely well mastered. Briss's total freedom of composition is a poetry of drawing that leads us to the abyss, to the point of dreaming." In Le Figaro again, the critic Yves Berger emphasizes that Samy Briss modifies Creation by amputating and deforming the forms: "We return, here, to the reproach that the painter addresses to creation. From it, he accepts everything except, who knows why, the top and the bottom of the forms [...] in front of his mysterious and troubling paintings, everyone recognizes that he is right." According to Les Nouvelles Littéraires, "Samy Briss shows in an exceptional way that popular art is always a rich vein of sap for all artistic forms."
