Sumer gallery is pleased to present Rhythm & Cuts, a new exhibition by Sydney-based artist Huseyin Sami. The show features a collection of the artist's signature ‘cut paintings’ (all 2025). This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Exhibiting widely for the past three decades, Sami has built a strong following within his Australian homeland and abroad. Recognised for his playful approach to painting and abstraction, he has pursued a project built around experiments in paint, and considering paintings relationship to the body. 

 Continuing a tradition of non-objective and reductive painting, Sami’s work can be seen to echo those of key European modernists; and most notably, the cut and punctured monochrome paintings of Lucio Fontana. Yet whereas Fontana’s works appear impassioned and violent—gesturing towards the heroic, with existential gravitas—Sami’s own cut paintings seem, by contrast, far lighter and more exuberant. Fontana’s preference of primary colours, is contrasted with pastel tones in Sami’s work. Both artists arcing cuts are equally simple—both recording the artists’ hands and bodies moving through space—yet Sami’s gestures seem less grandiose. By shifting the cut from up-and-down to sideways, over and across, he makes rainbow-like cuts. These in turn create flaps in the canvas that peel downwards and out from the frame—whimsical and droopy, is if it were the tongue of a cartoon puppy, or the emoji you send when conveying that you’ve said or done something cheeky.