Mohammed Sami: After the Storm – a 'cunning' and 'highly intelligent' show

It's hard to imagine an odder pairing than this one, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Blenheim Palace "is a particularly posh and gigantic stately home, the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, the birthplace of Winston Churchill", and a treasure trove of paintings and ornaments glorifying British military history. On show there in this new exhibition is the work of Mohammed Sami, a 40-year-old artist from Baghdad who cut his teeth creating "heroic murals" of Saddam Hussein before fleeing Iraq for Europe after the 2003 invasion.

His 14 paintings here, "a shadowy mix of figuration and abstraction", dwell on "dark subject matter" and invoke the historical traumas of his native country's recent history. Yet in defiance of expectations, the exhibition turns out to be a marriage "made in heaven". Sami's "subtle and mysterious" paintings are scattered through the palace's "plush interiors", their subversive messages – about "war, destruction and the behaviour of the West" – intermingle with Blenheim's bombastic collections. The juxtapositions make for a "cunning" and highly intelligent show.

Sami's "gloomily nuanced compositions" sit extremely well in this "grand setting", agreed Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. In one corridor, also housing an equestrian portrait of the 1st Duke of Marlborough and "a cabinet filled with toy soldiers" once admired by Churchill, Sami fields a "vast, frameless" painting depicting "an opulent room, seen from above, with four gilt chairs set around a table on an oriental rug". Overlaying this fine ensemble is "a sinister saltire-shaped shadow", perhaps cast by a ceiling fan or the rotor blades of a helicopter – "as if the interior, like a building marked by a plague cross, has been condemned". Another picture, positioned next to a cabinet full of Meissen porcelain, gives us "smashed white china, beside a pool of blood". "It's a ballsy house guest who accepts an invitation and then agitates for that house to be, as it were, burned down."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

At times, Sami is let down by Blenheim's curators, said Michael Delgado in Apollo magazine. A large painting of Baghdad's skyline "bathed in radioactive orange", for instance, is simply "plonked" in the middle of a room: "pleasing" as it is to look at, it is "disengaged" from its surroundings. Generally, though, this is a clever show featuring some exhilarating works. Scattered between the palace's many portraits are Sami's evocative "depictions of men in military dress". The "simplest and most effective work" is a likeness of Churchill, "his face and body completely blacked out". It alludes to the way that certain branches of Islam prohibit the depiction of humans; but in using the unmistakeable silhouette of the wartime leader – "a blank canvas onto which various people project their own feelings" – Sami also "mounts a gentle but serious challenge to Britain's ideas about itself".

Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire. Until 6 October