Kamrooz Aram

Ancient Through Modern

Kamrooz Aram’s diverse practice often engages the complicated relationship between traditional non-Western art and Western Modernism. Through a variety of forms including painting, collage, drawing and installation, Aram has found the potential for image- making to function critically in its use as a tool for a certain renegotiation of history.

Aram’s paintings reveal the essential role that ornament played in the development of Modern art in the West. Taking floral motifs from Persian carpets, Aram repeatedly reconfigures them into painterly mediations, building the pattern, destroying it and rebuilding again, resulting in explosive images, always in a state of flux. These lush canvases form repetitive patterns that coax new meaning from the chaos of fragments. Aram complicates the relationship between ornament and decoration, revealing the history of ornament as a drive towards the absence of figuration, a movement to wards abstraction.

Another aspect of his practice considers the carefully constructed neutrality of museum displays as a primary site of encountering artworks. Along with the reproduction and circulation of artworks in catalogues and art history texts, these displays work to historicize them in their original context, often inculcating a sense of cultural nostalgia along the way. Through photography, collage and installation, Aram teases out the temporal and cultural distance that results in artworks becoming contextualized, and reproduced as artifacts.

Kamrooz Aram (born 1978, Shiraz) received his MFA from Columbia University in 2003. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Palimpsest: Unstable Paintings for Anxious Interiors, Green Art Gallery, Dubai (2014); Kamrooz Aram/Julie Weitz, The Suburban, Chicago (2013); Brute Ornament: Kamrooz Aram and Seher Shah, curated by Murtaza Vali, Green Art Gallery, Dubai (2012); Negotiations, Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York (2011); Generation After Generation, Revolution after Revelation, LA><ART, Los Angeles (2010) and Kamrooz Aram: Realms and Reveries, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2006). Select group exhibitions include Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio (2014) and Akron Art Museum, Akron (2015); The Elephant in The Dark, The Devi Art Foundation, Delhi (2012); roundabout, City Gallery Wellington (2010); the Busan Biennale (2006); P.S.1/MoMA’s Greater New York 2005; and the Prague Biennale I (2003). Aram is the winner of the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2014; he has also been awarded grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2004) and the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program (2001-2003). His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; The FLAG Foundation, New York; and Deutsche Bank Collection among others. Aram’s practice has been widely featured and reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum.com, ArtAsiaPacific, The New Yorker, The National and Bidoun. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Untitled (Ancient through Modern 2), 2015Mixed media on linen40 x 50 cm

Untitled (Ancient through Modern 5), 2015Mixed media on linen61 x 61 cm

As a gallery that has been active in the region for almost two decades, Green Art Gallery has had the privilege of bearing witness to the tremendous transformations the region’s art scene has experienced, in terms of artistic production and presentation, audience reception, and the growing role of institutions, small and large, public and private.

What began in 1995 as a salon d’art driven by two women’s personal passion for Modern Arab art has evolved into a contemporary art space whose specific mission it to promote artists working across different media, traditional and new, whose practice is representative of our current time, with an emphasis on research based ideas.

Green Art Gallery now represents a multi-generational mix of artists from the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, Turkey and beyond including Turkish artist Hale Tenger, NY-based Iranian artist Kamrooz Aram and NY- based Palestinian artist Shadi Habib Allah. The Gallery has continued to grow and in 2012 added NY-based artist Seher Shah and Venezuelan artist Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck to the artist roster.

In addition to holding solo exhibitions for its roster of artists, Green Art Gallery regularly collaborates with curators and guest artists in an effort to present their work for the first time in the region.

In 2012, Green Art Gallery initiated a publication program collaborating with curators, writers, and artists, to expand the reach of its exhibition program beyond the white cube. In this way, the Gallery aims to contribute to the documentation, archiving and historicizing of artistic production in the region.

Since 2010, Green Art Gallery has participated in various international and regional art fairs including Art Dubai, Moving Image Fair in London, Art Basel, Art Hong Kong, Artissima Art Fair, Art Brussels, and FIAC’s (Off)icielle.

Kamrooz Aram

Ancient Through Modern