Chicago Artworks on Display: Explore the Current Space

Lis Sam was born in Tunisia in 1989 and moved to France as a child. The landscape of the south, its warmth and its botanical excess, stayed with him. So did the street art culture he came up in. He is entirely self-taught. 

The turning point arrived on a visit to a butterfly greenhouse in southern France. He was not looking for a subject. What he found, watching butterflies move through dense flower and foliage, was an image he could not let go. That moment became the foundation of the body of work he has spent more than a decade building. His most celebrated series, Blossoming Girls, assembles thousands of meticulously preserved butterflies into textured female portraits framed under glass. A butterfly wing that reads as part of a shoulder at distance reveals its own intricate geometry up close. The work is simultaneously a portrait and a natural specimen, a painting and a sculptural object.

His work is held in private collections across Europe and internationally, and is represented by galleries in France, Belgium, and the United States. Jardin d'Hiver is his first work at Carousel Fine Art Chicago.

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