Sam Szafran

Sam Szafran was born Samuel Berger on 19 November 1934 in Paris to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, and he adopted the surname Szafran — his mother's maiden name — as his artistic identity. He spent his working life in Paris and died there on 14 September 2019, and is buried at the cimetière parisien de Bagneux. Working almost exclusively in pastel and works on paper, he built a body of work distinguished by obsessive architectural subject matter, vertiginous spatial distortion, and an intensely personal relationship to the spaces he depicted.

Szafran's most celebrated works centre on a handful of recurring motifs that he returned to across decades. L'Imprimerie Bellini, a large-format pastel on paper from around the 1970s held in the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation and Family Collections in New York, depicts the dizzying spiral staircase of the Bellini printing works and has been described by the Foundation as his absolute masterpiece — a crystallisation of his command of compressed perspective and obsessive architectural detail. Related works such as Escaliers de l'imprimerie Bellini, dating from around 1968 to 1972, push the same stairwell motif toward near-abstraction, rendering multiple curving landings in ways that test the outer limits of pictorial depth. Alongside these architectural interiors, Szafran developed an equally sustained engagement with greenhouse spaces: Serre aux philodendrons, a large pastel produced across the 1970s through the 1990s, traces his shift toward hybrid vegetal-architectural environments, demonstrating his technical mastery in rendering leaves, filtered light, and layered spatial recession. His studio on the rue de Crussol provided yet another sustained subject in works such as Atelier de l'artiste, rue de Crussol, where stacked canvases, racks, and plants transform the workspace into an autobiographical universe.

Throughout his career Szafran was represented by Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris, which continues to act as the principal gallery for his work. His prints have been shown at Galerie Sandra Blum, and his secondary market presence extends to Waddington Custot in London, Galerie DIL in Paris, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art in London, and Galerie Champetier in Nice. Institutionally, his work entered the collection of the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'Art moderne in Paris, and in 2015 the Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny established a permanent gallery devoted to his work. Major exhibitions have included a solo presentation at the Musée Max Ernst de Brühl du LVR in Brühl in 2010, a solo at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire in 2017, and a retrospective titled Sam Szafran: Obsessions of a Painter at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris in 2022 — the same year Galerie DIL mounted a group homage to the artist. His work was also included in the landmark survey 60-72, douze ans d'art contemporain en France at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1972. Most recently, Waddington Custot presented his work at Art Genève in 2025.