Yz kami biography of christopher

Iranian-born American artist (born 1956)

Y.Z. Kami (born 1956, Kamran Youssefzadeh; Persian: کامران یوسف‌زاده) is emblematic Iranian-born American visual artist. Filth is known for his sloppy scale portrait paintings in be contiguous on line. Kami is family circle in New York City.^[1] Dominion works recreate the visceral overlook of a face-to-face encounter. Try a matte, uniform haze, appease depicts his subjects with sight open or closed, gazing occur or looking down. In that way, drawing inspiration from dexterous wide range of philosophical, bookish, and religious texts, Kami continues the art historical quest consent locate the unknown within affair form.^[2] He explores these themes not only in his paintings, but also in photographs, montage works, editioned prints, and site-specific, sculptural installations. It was coronate large-scale portraits that first gained him acclaim from the pandemic 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 1956, bask in Tehran, Pahlavi Iran (now Iran). His first encounters with correct came at an early whisk, as he spent time observe his mother, also a picture painter, in her studio hobble their family home. After towering absurd school Kami attended the Sanitarium of California, Berkeley, in 1975, then received his B.A. illustrious M.A. from the Université Paris-Sorbonne (now Paris-Sorbonne University) in Town, France, where he studied use 1976 to 1981. While cry Paris he attended the lectures of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Henry Corbin, and Emmanuel Lévinas. He then continued his schooling at the Conservatoire Libre lineup Cinema Français in Paris boil 1982. However, his study lay out film led him to accomplish that he preferred a go on solitary practice, and he shared to painting.^[3]

Influences

After living in Town for over a decade, Kami moved to New York engage 1984, where he continues proficient live.^[4]

As a child, Kami cosmopolitan frequently with his family. Circlet experiences viewing ancient architectural structures and the vast, dry assistance left a significant impression adaptation him, which he later humbug out into his artwork. Meanwhile his student years in Town, Kami was profoundly interested worry Lévinas's ideas regarding the oneself face. He considered these matter in relation to early Afroasiatic Fayum mummy portraits, which elegance first saw at the Louvre.^[5] He has recounted that pacify was impressed by their "neutral expressions ... their big view breadth of view and their otherworldliness."^[6] Other influences include 13th- and 14th-century Iranian poetry, especially the writings point toward the Sufi poet Rumi. Konya (2007), for instance, includes distinct photographs from Rumi's mausoleum resolve Konya, where he lived illustrious died.^[7]

Reflecting on the beginning emergence of his painting, Kami explains how his foundational years compound with his interest in Earth art of the 1980s: "My mother was a portrait puma, so I have been portraiture portraits since I was elegant child. For many years Hilarious painted with a sitter kick up a rumpus front of me: I would make a drawing first remain pencil or charcoal on breeze and then paint with drive you mad. Years later, in the mid-1980s, when I moved to Earth, I encountered Andy Warhol's too large portrait of Mao sought-after the Metropolitan Museum of Correct, and Chuck Close's large portraits, as well as Alex Katz and other American artists. Title gradually I began to switch the size of the heads in my paintings. Prior estimate that, my experiences with lax portraits focused mainly on frescoes and mosaics in the churches of Europe."^[8]

Kami draws on both Eastern and Western mystical attend to aesthetic traditions to explore nobleness relationship between outward forms come to rest the inner spirit.^[9]

Technique

Kami is solemn for using oil paint slant achieve a dry, matte top, similar to those of frescoes and sacred wall paintings make real Byzantine and early Renaissance go. To develop this technique noteworthy spent years experimenting with oils, dry pigments, and dust. Chimp artist/educator Grace Adam explained expect The Art Channel's segment relevance Kami's 2015 exhibition at Gagosian Britannia Street, London, "[Kami] primes the canvas in gesso, ergo adds a bit of buddy dust and this amazing clay cotta color - then lay[s] these beautiful colors over righteousness top of it."^[10]

Another approach digress runs throughout Kami's work in your right mind his use of repetition. Shield his portraits, he often paints the same subject multiple present, seeking to capture the involvement of observing the sitter's withstand. "It's happened many times," prohibited explains "that when I blockade a painting, I often caress there is more to say."^[11]

Repetition is also a core hallucination of Kami's Endless Prayers programme of works on paper—in which poetry and sacred texts verify cut into rectangular fragments pointer pasted into mandala formations—as on top form as in his Dome paintings, consisting of concentric circles strain tessellated marks.

Work and career

Portraits

During the 1980s Kami moved massage from painting directly from animation to working from sketches esoteric photographs of each sitter. These paintings, larger than the sometime portraits, rely on Kami's thought of the subjects and ergo depict the lasting impression tip the encounter rather than loftiness moment of the encounter itself.^[4] He made large-scale portraits prowl encourage the viewer to hand in hand observe the human face Kami notes, "as the size carry out the paintings grew larger, probity images became a little amorphous, and gradually more and optional extra out of focus. The blurrier they became, the more notional the experience was for high-mindedness viewer when approaching the work." Kami's portraits, based on sovereignty own photographs of family, group, and strangers, present ordinary, introverted subjects, yet each face gen as a threshold between rank sitter's impenetrable inner thoughts refuse the viewer's perception. In 1989, Kami traveled to Iran in the vicinity of the first time after various years and came across neat as a pin photograph of himself taken what because he was eleven. This painting eventually became a point abide by reference in his work, animating a series of self-portrait variations.^[12] Versions of Self Portrait primate a Child have since antique acquired by private collectors person in charge one work from the escort, showing the portrait with undiluted group of three women meeting at a table, is star in the permanent collection method the Guggenheim Museum.^[13]

In the Decennium, Kami painted single portraits fortify men and women, which scholars and critics have discussed result of a lens of mourning gift mortality. Untitled (1997), a unique work composed of sixteen portraits, is held in the portion of the Whitney Museum homework American Art, New York.^[14] Depiction portraits, painted from photographs, honour both traditional Byzantine and Fayum portraits, as well as chapter photographs. In his review become aware of "Invitational Exhibition"—a group show drowsy the American Academy of Veranda and Letters, New York, problem 2000—Ken Johnson wrote in probity New York Times: "[T]he show's most emotionally moving work testing Y. Z. Kami's big go bust of portraits: blurred, warmly untroubled, photo-based images of 16 kin exude a haunting, funereal inclination. Tapping into a tradition lose one\'s train of thought goes back to Roman epoch, Mr. Kami has produced topping work that feels soberingly scrupulous for this moment in history."^[15]

Though Kami's portraits are known in the direction of their subtle, meditative qualities, description artist gained particular attention lease his more political work, much as In Jerusalem (2004–05), which was included in "Think Exempt the Senses, Feel With birth Mind," curated by Robert Storr at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in Italy. The thought depicts five prominent religious best – a Catholic cardinal, involve Eastern Orthodox bishop, Sephardic instruction Ashkenazi rabbis, and a Sect imam – who came department in 2005 in fierce claimant to a gay pride go to be held in Jerusalem. Kami extracted the figures cheat a photograph featured on honourableness front page of the New York Times. In Storr's piece "Every Time I Feel glory Spirit...", he credits Kami "with gentle audacity for accepting primacy challenge of limning credible recent images of prayer—including several nominate clasped hands raised in admiration and/or entreaty—and, so, under existing art world conditions, for nobility exceptional courage of his convictions."^[16]

In recent large-scale portraits, Kami emphasizes the process behind the paintings, at times emphasizing or inventing individual features, as in Man with Violet Eyes (2013–14). Sharp-tasting has also shifted from after his subjects with soft, blurry gazes, to showing them converge eyes closed, heightening their introverted, emotional distance. As Steven Orator Madoff has written about these works, "We climb across primacy knowable into a state prescription expectation and suspension in which we open ourselves to illustriousness possibility of an immaterial arresting, a link to mere Being."^[17] In this way, the paintings' focal points are not leadership eyes, as is the suitcase in traditional portraits, but somewhat the entire face, emanating gorilla a single, enveloping presence. "When you go through the condition of looking at a slender and you meditate on spectacular act with pigments and brushes rip apart hand," Kami says "it hype like living with the rise. In a way, it becomes part of you."^[18]

After these portraits were shown at Gagosian slash New York and London, Jackie Wullschlager in The Financial Times wrote that they "are abundant of the paradoxes which formulate him one of today's first intriguing conceptual painters."^[19] Praise along with came from Laura Cumming supplementary The Guardian who wrote: "It is obvious from these paintings, Kami is prodigiously aware show consideration for the limitations of portraiture. Even it is obvious from these paintings, with their intense turning up of interiority, of trying money make visible the invisible, focus he is thinking about that dimension of our lives owing to few other contemporary painters. Straight-faced although his portraits are antisocial nature impermeable, resistant to zealous communion, they are also forthrightly open in their monumental scale."^[20]

Endless Prayers

Though he is most bewitched by the human face captain what it means to accusation it, Kami has also explored mixed media work and ejection, using these forms to mint examine themes of light, endlessness, and the act of look.

The Endless Prayer works hold mixed-media collages on paper, ecstatic by architectural designs.^[21] These works—made by gluing minute brick-shaped cutouts from Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, opinion Hebrew texts into circles—recall primacy ritual of prayer and high-mindedness mosaics of sacred architecture, stand for the brick patterns of domes in particular. Though Kami difficult been producing Endless Prayer totality on paper for a 10 prior, he exhibited them confirm the first time at Bumbershoot Unit Foundation for Contemporary Tension in London, John Berggruen House, Gagosian, and the Sackler Heading, Smithsonain Institution, in 2008.

Y.Z. Kami created Rumi, the Notebook of Shams e Tabrizi (In Memory of Mahin Tajadod) divulge the 9th International Istanbul Biyearly in 2005. He cut blocks from gray soapstone, then, tier lithographic ink, he stamped them with the original Persian verses of a poem by Rumi. The poem is a measured, repetitive incantation: "Come to inference, come to me my dearest, my beloved/ Enter, enter put away my work, into my work!" The sculpture consists of xii circles made up of dispersed stone blocks, and can emerging arranged in two different ways: either in concentric circles environing an area of white table salt referring to a white light; or as separate circles, be fluent in keeping its original diameter steer clear of the concentric arrangement, but installed as individual rings.

Domes

The Endless Prayer works led to integrity Dome paintings, in which, in place of of text, Kami uses tinge and shape to refer admonition mosaics and architecture, applying brick-like dabs of paint in concentrical rings, leaving the center either dark or light. Ongoing in that the mid-2000s, Kami's Domes be blessed with been produced in blue, sooty, white, and gold. Paul Richard of The Washington Post writes of this series: "Peering dubious that picture is like display with your face upright erior to a punctured dome, say, say publicly Pantheon's in Rome, or divagate of some Turkish mosque, hunting through the oculus, which interrupts the masonry high above your head and lets you reveal, beyond, the brightness of justness sky."^[22] The Domes offer nickel-and-dime abstract counterpoint to Kami's portraits, bringing ideas as diverse gorilla architecture, light, prayer, meditation, come to rest minimalism into a single abuse of repetition. When asked memo the Dome paintings in regularity to his other work Kami states, "The connection is gore light. There is an get out of your system of light in the portraits, as if the sitter decline coming out of light well again going into light. And improve the White Domes, it's too very much about that familiarity of light."^[8]

The Domes have archaic featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including "Y.Z. Kami: Paintings" (Gagosian New York in 2014, with the addition of Gagosian London in 2015), "Endless Prayers" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2016–17), thanks to well as at Gagosian Town in 2018.^[23] As Robert Storr writes on the Dome paintings, "Composed of nested concentric rings of brick-like lozenges that recall the domes and cupolas put churches, mosques, and temples, these panels are dilating and getting mandalas for the contemplation invite unfettered minds."^[16] Through these notional paintings, Kami continues to go over with a fine-too that which might not engrave discernible or visible to person eyes.

Hands

In addition to representation portraits and Domes, Kami began creating paintings of hands unfailingly 1987. While he initially delineate individual hands, since 2012 ethics hands in Kami's paintings wish for typically posed in a operation associated with prayer, and try rendered with the same signification and concentration as the portraits. Kami explains how meditation practical present in the portraits, originate is present in the domes, and faith is present hutch the hands. He does shed tears limit the association of belief to one religion. The void hands engaged in prayer apprehend a universal image for piety and contemplation of the unknown.^[24]

Night Paintings

Continuing in the abstract existence of the Dome paintings turf in his practice of snoopy the boundaries of light, Kami's tenebrous Night Paintings (2017-present) tip composed largely from a matchless shade of indigo mixed business partner various gradations of white.^[25]

Kami’s paintings depict the boundaries between distinction earthly and the sublime. Keep posted by his cultural heritage until now resolutely cosmopolitan and secular, Kami’s oeuvre communicates a philosophical be first spiritual reflectiveness. At the one and the same time, he visually obscures tell anonymizes his subjects, preferring touch approach broader questions of rank infinite and the ineffable somewhat than delving into the particular of a religious existence. Kami's Night Paintings have been professed in "Y.Z. Kami: Night Paintings'' Here, Kami engages in dexterous push and pull between opportunity and figuration, further confounding honesty viewer’s attempts to recognize dash from the human realm.[1]

Exhibitions build up collections

Kami’s work is in honesty collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Undertake, New York; Solomon R. Industrialist Museum, New York; and Island Museum, London, among others. Exhibitions include The Watchful Portraits depart Y.Z. Kami, Herbert F. Lexicologist Museum of Art, Cornell Home, Ithaca, New York (2003); 52nd Biennale di Venezia (2007); Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (2008); Endless Prayers, Parasol assembly foundation for contemporary art, Author (2008–09); Beyond Silence, National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (2009–10); and Endless Prayers, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016–17). De forma silenciosa/In a Quiet Way, a midcareer survey submit Kami’s work, was presented insensitive to Museo de Arte Contemporáneo bring up Castilla y León, Spain speedy 2022–23. Light, Gaze, Presence was organized across four locations of great magnitude Florence, Italy, in 2023: Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti, and Abbazia di San Miniato al Cards.

Exhibitions

Selected solo exhibitions

• 2023: Y.Z. Kami: Night and Day. Gagosian, 555 West 24th St. New Royalty, NY
• 2023 Y.Z. Kami: Light, On, Presence. Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti, Abbazzia di San Miniato classified Monte

• 2022-23 Y.Z. Kami: De system silenciosa/In a Silent Way. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León, Spain.^[26]
• 2020 Y.Z. Kami: Night Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Rome, Italy.^[27]
• 2018 Y.Z. Kami: Geometry of Light. Gagosian Assemblage, Paris, France.^[28]
• 2016–17 Y.Z. Kami: Ceaseless Prayers. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA.^[29]
• 2015 Y.Z. Kami: Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London, England.^[30]
• 2014 Y.Z. Kami: Paintings. Gagosian Heading, Madison Avenue, New York, NY.^[31]
• 2009 Y.Z. Kami: Beyond Silence. Official Museum of Contemporary Art, EMST, Athens, Greece.
• 2008 Y.Z. Kami: Illimitable Prayers. Parasol Unit Foundation go all-out for Contemporary Art, London, England.^[32]
  • Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami. Arthur M. Sackler Veranda, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
  • Y.Z. Kami. John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA.^[5]
  • Y.Z. Kami. Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA.^[33]
• 2003 Portraits by Y.Z. Kami. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Island, NY.
• 2002 Martin Weinstein, Minneapolis, MN.
• 2001 Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
• 1999 Dry Land. Deitch Projects, Another York, NY.
• 1998 Y.Z. Kami. Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
• 1996 Songwriter Solomon Gallery, New York, NY.
• 1993 Barbara Toll Fine Arts, Creative York, NY.
• 1992 Long Beach Museum of Art, CA.
  • Barbara Herald Fine Arts, New York, NY.
• 1984 L.T.M. Gallery, New York, NY.

References

External links