Kamrooz Aram

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, Kamrooz has found the potential for image-making to function critically in its use as a tool for a certain renegotiation of history. The artist's paintings reveal the essential role that ornament played in the development of Modern art in the West. Taking floral motifs from Persian carpets, he 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. Kamrooz complicates the relationship between ornament and decoration, revealing the history of ornament as a drive towards the absence of figuration, a movement towards 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, Kamrooz teases out the temporal and cultural distance that results in artworks becoming contextualized, and reproduced as artifacts.

He has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Green Art Gallery in Dubai, The Suburban in Chicago Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. His work has been included in group exhibitions at The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York at New Paltz in New York, McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Akron Art Museum, The Devi Art Foundation in Delhi, and P.S.1 MoMA in New York, among other institutions.

Courtesy of Green Art Gallery