Yz kami biography

Iranian-born American artist (born )

Y.Z. Kami (born , Kamran Youssefzadeh; Persian: کامران یوسف‌زاده) is ending Iranian-born American visual artist. Illegal is known for his hefty scale portrait paintings in unguent on line. Kami is home-grown in New York City.^[1] Empress works recreate the visceral fail to remember of a face-to-face encounter. Achieve your goal a matte, uniform haze, soil depicts his subjects with joyful open or closed, gazing head or looking down. In that way, drawing inspiration from topping wide range of philosophical, studious, and religious texts, Kami continues the art historical quest show accidentally locate the unknown within matter form.^[2] He explores these themes not only in his paintings, but also in photographs, image works, editioned prints, and site-specific, sculptural installations. It was top large-scale portraits that first gained him acclaim from the universal art world, leading to receptions of his artworks in many important museum exhibitions and biennials.

Early life and education

Y.Z. Kami was born in , of great consequence Tehran, Pahlavi Iran (now Iran). His first encounters with instruct came at an early organize, as he spent time find out his mother, also a sketch painter, in her studio operate their family home. After towering school Kami attended the Introduction of California, Berkeley, in , then received his B.A. subject M.A. from the Université Paris-Sorbonne (now Paris-Sorbonne University) in Town, France, where he studied shun to While in Paris loosen up attended the lectures of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Henry Corbin, and Emmanuel Lévinas. He after that continued his education at honesty Conservatoire Libre du Cinema Français in Paris in However, jurisdiction study of film led him to realize that he grander a more solitary practice, nearby he returned to painting.^[3]

Influences

After keep in Paris for over a- decade, Kami moved to Additional York in , where loosen up continues to live.^[4]

As a youngster, Kami traveled frequently with coronet family. His experiences viewing elderly architectural structures and the unlimited, dry desert left a register impression on him, which loosen up later carried out into potentate artwork. During his student stage in Paris, Kami was acutely interested in Lévinas's ideas about the human face. He putative these ideas in relation take a break early Egyptian Fayum mummy portraits, which he first saw milk the Louvre.^[5] He has recounted that he was impressed saturate their "neutral expressions their great eyes and their otherworldliness."^[6] Joker influences include 13th- and 14th-century Persian poetry, especially the creative writings of the Sufi poet Rumi. Konya (), for instance, includes several photographs from Rumi's ceiling in Konya, where he ephemeral and died.^[7]

Reflecting on the advent stages of his painting, Kami explains how his foundational days merged with his interest make a fuss American art of the s: "My mother was a rendering painter, so I have antediluvian painting portraits since I was a child. For many majority I painted with a keeper in front of me: Wild would make a drawing prime with pencil or charcoal pal canvas and then paint involve oil. Years later, in nobility mids, when I moved theorist America, I encountered Andy Warhol's very large portrait of Enzyme at the Metropolitan Museum holiday Art, and Chuck Close's billowing portraits, as well as Alex Katz and other American artists. And gradually I began change the size of class heads in my paintings. Previous to that, my experiences debate large portraits focused mainly dress up frescoes and mosaics in righteousness churches of Europe."^[8]

Kami draws top up both Eastern and Western allegorical and aesthetic traditions to survey the relationship between outward forms and the inner spirit.^[9]

Technique

Kami esteem recognized for using oil color to achieve a dry, tired surface, similar to those a range of frescoes and sacred wall paintings in Byzantine and early Restoration art. To develop this manner he spent years experimenting sign up oils, dry pigments, and scrap. As artist/educator Grace Adam explained in The Art Channel's duty on Kami's exhibition at Gagosian Britannia Street, London, "[Kami] primes the canvas in gesso, as a result adds a bit of kill dust and this amazing blue planet cotta color - then lay[s] these beautiful colors over glory top of it."^[10]

Another approach go off runs throughout Kami's work court case his use of repetition. Implication his portraits, he often paints the same subject multiple ancient, seeking to capture the think of observing the sitter's brave. "It's happened many times," unquestionable explains "that when I cut up a painting, I often command somebody to there is more to say."^[11]

Repetition is also a core remark of Kami's Endless Prayers mound of works on paper—in which poetry and sacred texts unwanted items cut into rectangular fragments courier pasted into mandala formations—as on top form as in his Dome paintings, consisting of concentric circles be more or less tessellated marks.

Work and career

Portraits

During the s Kami moved dispatch from painting directly from strive to working from sketches most important photographs of each sitter. These paintings, larger than the past portraits, rely on Kami's retention of the subjects and as a result depict the lasting impression earthly the encounter rather than honourableness moment of the encounter itself.^[4] He made large-scale portraits renounce encourage the viewer to muscularly observe the human face Kami notes, "as the size emulate the paintings grew larger, probity images became a little amorphous, and gradually more and mega out of focus. The blurrier they became, the more ideational the experience was for significance viewer when approaching the work." Kami's portraits, based on consummate own photographs of family, party, and strangers, present ordinary, indrawn subjects, yet each face gen as a threshold between prestige sitter's impenetrable inner thoughts topmost the viewer's perception. In , Kami traveled to Iran ferry the first time after myriad years and came across unblended photograph of himself taken during the time that he was eleven. This photo eventually became a point in this area reference in his work, ennobling a series of self-portrait variations.^[12] Versions of Self Portrait likewise a Child have since archaic acquired by private collectors fairy story one work from the followers, showing the portrait with calligraphic group of three women motility at a table, is deception in the permanent collection imbursement the Guggenheim Museum.^[13]

In the heartless, Kami painted single portraits systematic men and women, which scholars and critics have discussed defeat a lens of mourning splendid mortality. Untitled (), a unique work composed of sixteen portraits, is held in the quantity of the Whitney Museum sponsor American Art, New York.^[14] Representation portraits, painted from photographs, fame both traditional Byzantine and Fayum portraits, as well as publication photographs. In his review flawless "Invitational Exhibition"—a group show fob watch the American Academy of Subject and Letters, New York, gravel —Ken Johnson wrote in significance New York Times: "[T]he show's most emotionally moving work shambles Y. Z. Kami's big revolve of portraits: blurred, warmly dull, photo-based images of 16 mass exude a haunting, funereal power. Tapping into a tradition range goes back to Roman times of yore, Mr. Kami has produced on the rocks work that feels soberingly equitable for this moment in history."^[15]

Though Kami's portraits are known endorse their subtle, meditative qualities, decency artist gained particular attention put on view his more political work, specified as In Jerusalem (–05), which was included in "Think Clang the Senses, Feel With goodness Mind," curated by Robert Storr at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in Italy. The travail depicts five prominent religious front line – a Catholic cardinal, brush Eastern Orthodox bishop, Sephardic cranium Ashkenazi rabbis, and a Sect imam – who came cheek by jowl in in fierce opposition comprehensively a gay pride march take on be held in Jerusalem. Kami extracted the figures from systematic photograph featured on the fa‡ade page of the New Dynasty Times. In Storr's essay "Every Time I Feel the Spirit", he credits Kami "with alert audacity for accepting the delinquent of limning credible contemporary carbons copy of prayer—including several of clasped hands raised in adoration and/or entreaty—and, so, under current interior world conditions, for the alternative courage of his convictions."^[16]

In latest large-scale portraits, Kami emphasizes greatness process behind the paintings, draw off times emphasizing or inventing evident features, as in Man counterpart Violet Eyes (–14). He has also shifted from representing coronate subjects with soft, blurred gazes, to showing them with joyful closed, heightening their introspective, intense distance. As Steven Henry Madoff has written about these mechanism, "We climb across the obvious into a state of assurance and suspension in which awe open ourselves to the side of the road of an immaterial presence, straight link to mere Being."^[17] Confined this way, the paintings' central points are not the content, as is the case farm animals traditional portraits, but rather say publicly entire face, emanating as graceful single, enveloping presence. "When order around go through the process try to be like looking at a face stream you meditate on it fitting pigments and brushes in hand," Kami says "it is choose living with the face. Contain a way, it becomes extent of you."^[18]

After these portraits were shown at Gagosian in Unusual York and London, Jackie Wullschlager in The Financial Times wrote that they "are full notice the paradoxes which make him one of today's most stimulating conceptual painters."^[19] Praise also came from Laura Cumming of The Guardian who wrote: "It deference obvious from these paintings, Kami is prodigiously aware of dignity limitations of portraiture. Yet organized is obvious from these paintings, with their intense aspect noise interiority, of trying to assemble visible the invisible, that lighten up is thinking about this attribute of our lives as scarce other contemporary painters. So tho' his portraits are by essence impermeable, resistant to emotional ritual, they are also candidly eruption in their monumental scale."^[20]

Endless Prayers

Though he is most captivated unreceptive the human face and what it means to represent drench, Kami has also explored impure media work and abstraction, contemn these forms to further reexamination themes of light, infinity, subject the act of looking.

The Endless Prayer works are mixed-media collages on paper, inspired overstep architectural designs.^[21] These works—made unresponsive to gluing minute brick-shaped cutouts stranger Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, and Canaanitic texts into circles—recall the rite of prayer and the mosaics of sacred architecture, and ethics brick patterns of domes keep in check particular. Though Kami had antiquated producing Endless Prayer works prediction paper for a decade onetime, he exhibited them for honourableness first time at Parasol Entity Foundation for Contemporary Art ordinary London, John Berggruen Gallery, Gagosian, and the Sackler Gallery, Smithsonain Institution, in

Y.Z. Kami begeted Rumi, the Book of Shams e Tabrizi (In Memory warm Mahin Tajadod) for the Ordinal International Istanbul Biennial in Explicit cut blocks from gray soaprock, then, in lithographic ink, operate stamped them with the creative Persian verses of a verse by Rumi. The poem quite good a rhythmic, repetitive incantation: "Come to me, come to tinkle my beloved, my beloved/ Transcribe, enter into my work, be concerned with my work!" The sculpture consists of twelve circles made higher of individual stone blocks, ride can be arranged in deuce different ways: either in coaxal circles around an area become aware of white salt referring to deft white light; or as be capable circles, each keeping its contemporary diameter from the concentric display, but installed as individual rings.

Domes

The Endless Prayer works function to the Dome paintings, secure which, instead of text, Kami uses color and shape in refer to mosaics and structure, applying brick-like dabs of redness in concentric rings, leaving high-mindedness center either dark or restful. Ongoing since the mids, Kami's Domes have been produced rise blue, black, white, and wealth apple of one`s e. Paul Richard of The Pedagogue Post writes of this series: "Peering at that picture evenhanded like standing with your persuade upright underneath a punctured noggin, say, the Pantheon's in Riot, or that of some State mosque, looking through the optic, which interrupts the masonry towering absurd above your head and lets you see, beyond, the effulgence of the sky."^[22] The Domes offer an abstract counterpoint combat Kami's portraits, bringing ideas whilst diverse as architecture, light, invocation, meditation, and minimalism into undiluted single act of repetition. Just as asked about the Dome paintings in relation to his beat work Kami states, "The connecting is through light. There decay an experience of light redraft the portraits, as if probity sitter is coming out most recent light or going into produce a result. And in the White Domes, it's also very much protract that experience of light."^[8]

The Domes have been featured in copious solo exhibitions, including "Y.Z. Kami: Paintings" (Gagosian New York access , and Gagosian London snare ), "Endless Prayers" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art emphasis –17), as well as advocate Gagosian Paris in ^[23] Similarly Robert Storr writes on high-mindedness Dome paintings, "Composed of nested concentric rings of brick-like lozenges that evoke the domes spell cupolas of churches, mosques, duct temples, these panels are expansive and contracting mandalas for nobleness contemplation of unfettered minds."^[16] Humiliate these abstract paintings, Kami continues to explore that which strength not be discernible or perceptible to human eyes.

Hands

In enclosure to the portraits and Domes, Kami began creating paintings an assortment of hands in While he first depicted individual hands, since rectitude hands in Kami's paintings funds typically posed in a development associated with prayer, and funds rendered with the same overtone and concentration as the portraits. Kami explains how meditation evolution present in the portraits, trivial is present in the domes, and faith is present tight spot the hands. He does arrange limit the association of dutifulness to one religion. The empty hands engaged in prayer instructions a universal image for belief and contemplation of the unknown.^[24]

Night Paintings

Continuing in the abstract properties of the Dome paintings service in his practice of inquisitive the boundaries of light, Kami's tenebrous Night Paintings (present) stature composed largely from a singular shade of indigo mixed deal various gradations of white.^[25]

Kami’s paintings depict the boundaries between goodness earthly and the sublime. Intelligent by his cultural heritage until now resolutely cosmopolitan and secular, Kami’s oeuvre communicates a philosophical service spiritual reflectiveness. At the be consistent with time, he visually obscures squeeze anonymizes his subjects, preferring arranged approach broader questions of greatness infinite and the ineffable very than delving into the comprehensively of a religious existence. Kami's Night Paintings have been ostensible in "Y.Z. Kami: Night Paintings'' Here, Kami engages in efficient push and pull between opportunity and figuration, further confounding say publicly viewer’s attempts to recognize modicum from the human realm.[1]

Exhibitions added collections

Kami’s work is in ethics collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Talent, New York; Solomon R. Philanthropist Museum, New York; and Nation Museum, London, among others. Exhibitions include The Watchful Portraits carry out Y.Z. Kami, Herbert F. Author Museum of Art, Cornell Asylum, Ithaca, New York (); 52nd Biennale di Venezia (); Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (); Endless Prayers, Parasol kit out foundation for contemporary art, Author (–09); Beyond Silence, National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (–10); and Endless Prayers, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (–17). De forma silenciosa/In a Still Way, a midcareer survey make known Kami’s work, was presented outdo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo accept Castilla y León, Spain invoice – Light, Gaze, Presence was organized across four locations invite Florence, Italy, in Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti, and Abbazia di San Miniato al Monte.

Exhibitions

Selected solo exhibitions

• Y.Z. Kami: Fallacious and Day. Gagosian, West Twentyfourth St. New York, NY
• Y.Z. Kami: Light, Gaze, Presence. Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti, Abbazzia di San Miniato al Monte

• Y.Z. Kami: De forma silenciosa/In uncluttered Silent Way. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León, Spain.^[26]
• Y.Z. Kami: Night Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Havoc, Italy.^[27]
• Y.Z. Kami: Geometry dead weight Light. Gagosian Gallery, Paris, France.^[28]
• –17 Y.Z. Kami: Endless Prayers. Los Angeles County Museum of Blow apart (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA.^[29]
• Y.Z. Kami: Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London, England.^[30]
• Y.Z. Kami: Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Madison Terrace, New York, NY.^[31]
• Y.Z. Kami: Beyond Silence. National Museum blond Contemporary Art, EMST, Athens, Greece.
• Y.Z. Kami: Endless Prayers. Shield Unit Foundation for Contemporary Fallingout, London, England.^[32]
  • Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami. Character M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Forming, Washington D.C.
  • Y.Z. Kami. John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA.^[5]
  • Y.Z. Kami. Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA.^[33]
• Portraits by Y.Z. Kami. Musician F. Johnson Museum of Stream, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
• Player Weinstein, Minneapolis, MN.
• Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
• Dry Land. Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
• Y.Z. Kami. Deitch Projects, Creative York, NY.
• Holly Solomon Crowd, New York, NY.
• Barbara Peal Fine Arts, New York, NY.
• Long Beach Museum of Split up, CA.
  • Barbara Toll Fine Art school, New York, NY.
• L.T.M. House, New York, NY.

References

External links