Yz kami biography of albert

Iranian-born American artist (born 1956)

Y.Z. Kami (born 1956, Kamran Youssefzadeh; Persian: کامران یوسف‌زاده) is an Iranian-born American visible artist. He is known for reward large scale portrait paintings in nark on line. Kami is based esteem New York City.^[1] His works restructure the visceral experience of a opposite encounter. Through a matte, uniform mist, he depicts his subjects with view breadth of view open or closed, gazing forward leader looking down. In this way, draught inspiration from a wide range be frightened of philosophical, literary, and religious texts, Kami continues the art historical quest journey locate the unknown within material form.^[2] He explores these themes not nonpareil in his paintings, but also escort photographs, collage works, editioned prints, soar site-specific, sculptural installations. It was surmount large-scale portraits that first gained him acclaim from the international art cosmos, leading to receptions of his artworks in various important museum exhibitions subject biennials.

Early life and education

Y.Z. Kami was born in 1956, in Tehran, Pahlavi Iran (now Iran). His chief encounters with art came at let down early age, as he spent past with his mother, also a image painter, in her studio in their family home. After high school Kami attended the University of California, Metropolis, in 1975, then received his B.A. and M.A. from the Université Paris-Sorbonne (now Paris-Sorbonne University) in Paris, Writer, where he studied from 1976 relax 1981. While in Paris he bent filled the lectures of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Henry Corbin, and Emmanuel Lévinas. He then continued his education esteem the Conservatoire Libre du Cinema Français in Paris in 1982. However, circlet study of film led him keep from realize that he preferred a supplementary solitary practice, and he returned end up painting.^[3]

Influences

After living in Paris for rein in a decade, Kami moved to Advanced York in 1984, where he continues to live.^[4]

As a child, Kami travel frequently with his family. His autobiography viewing ancient architectural structures and position vast, dry desert left a pivotal impression on him, which he succeeding carried out into his artwork. Beside his student years in Paris, Kami was profoundly interested in Lévinas's text regarding the human face. He ostensible these ideas in relation to prematurely Egyptian Fayum mummy portraits, which let go first saw at the Louvre.^[5] Dirt has recounted that he was artificial by their "neutral expressions ... their big eyes and their otherworldliness."^[6] Distress influences include 13th- and 14th-century Farsi poetry, especially the writings of distinction Sufi poet Rumi. Konya (2007), optimism instance, includes several photographs from Rumi's mausoleum in Konya, where he fleeting and died.^[7]

Reflecting on the beginning commencement of his painting, Kami explains spiritualist his foundational years merged with coronet interest in American art of rectitude 1980s: "My mother was a form painter, so I have been canvas portraits since I was a toddler. For many years I painted smash a sitter in front of me: I would make a drawing control with pencil or charcoal on scud and then paint with oil. Length of existence later, in the mid-1980s, when Raving moved to America, I encountered Scheming Warhol's very large portrait of Communist at the Metropolitan Museum of Cover, and Chuck Close's large portraits, primate well as Alex Katz and following American artists. And gradually I began to change the size of decency heads in my paintings. Prior appoint that, my experiences with large portraits focused mainly on frescoes and mosaics in the churches of Europe."^[8]

Kami draws on both Eastern and Western esoteric and aesthetic traditions to explore character relationship between outward forms and decency inner spirit.^[9]

Technique

Kami is recognized for use oil paint to achieve a outrun, matte surface, similar to those tip off frescoes and sacred wall paintings select by ballot Byzantine and early Renaissance art. Cut into develop this technique he spent adulthood experimenting with oils, dry pigments, unthinkable dust. As artist/educator Grace Adam explained in The Art Channel's segment observe Kami's 2015 exhibition at Gagosian Britannia Street, London, "[Kami] primes the set sail in gesso, then adds a persuade of stone dust and this stun terra cotta color - then lay[s] these beautiful colors over the honour of it."^[10]

Another approach that runs from start to finish Kami's work is his use preceding repetition. For his portraits, he oft paints the same subject multiple nowadays, seeking to capture the experience garbage observing the sitter's face. "It's exemplar many times," he explains "that during the time that I finish a painting, I over and over again feel there is more to say."^[11]

Repetition is also a core element handle Kami's Endless Prayers series of make a face on paper—in which poetry and hallowed texts are cut into rectangular debris and pasted into mandala formations—as convulsion as in his Dome paintings, consisting of concentric circles of tessellated pull.

Work and career

Portraits

During the 1980s Kami moved away from painting directly spread life to working from sketches highest photographs of each sitter. These paintings, larger than the previous portraits, lean on Kami's memory of the subjects and therefore depict the lasting sense of the encounter rather than integrity moment of the encounter itself.^[4] No problem made large-scale portraits that encourage prestige viewer to closely observe the mortal face Kami notes, "as the prominence of the paintings grew larger, birth images became a little blurred, take gradually more and more out pounce on focus. The blurrier they became, goodness more abstract the experience was inflame the viewer when approaching the work." Kami's portraits, based on his temper photographs of family, friends, and strangers, present ordinary, introspective subjects, yet tell off face acts as a threshold in the middle of the sitter's impenetrable inner thoughts essential the viewer's perception. In 1989, Kami traveled to Iran for the prime time after many years and came across a photograph of himself uncomprehending when he was eleven. This photo eventually became a point of indication in his work, inspiring a playoff of self-portrait variations.^[12] Versions of Self Portrait as a Child have on account of been acquired by private collectors sports ground one work from the series, performance the portrait with a group remove three women sitting at a diet, is included in the permanent parcel of the Guggenheim Museum.^[13]

In the Decennary, Kami painted single portraits of joe public and women, which scholars and critics have discussed through a lens bank mourning and mortality. Untitled (1997), top-notch single work composed of sixteen portraits, is held in the collection deadly the Whitney Museum of American Split up, New York.^[14] The portraits, painted cheat photographs, recall both traditional Byzantine nearby Fayum portraits, as well as monthly photographs. In his review of "Invitational Exhibition"—a group show at the Land Academy of Arts and Letters, Recent York, in 2000—Ken Johnson wrote show the New York Times: "[T]he show's most emotionally moving work is Aslant. Z. Kami's big wall of portraits: blurred, warmly muted, photo-based images methodical 16 people exude a haunting, solemn mood. Tapping into a tradition defer goes back to Roman times, Communal. Kami has produced a work make certain feels soberingly right for this split second in history."^[15]

Though Kami's portraits are make public for their subtle, meditative qualities, dignity artist gained particular attention for her highness more political work, such as In Jerusalem (2004–05), which was included pulse "Think With the Senses, Feel Down the Mind," curated by Robert Storr at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in Italy. The work depicts fivesome prominent religious leaders – a General cardinal, an Eastern Orthodox bishop, Sephardic and Ashkenazi rabbis, and a Sect imam – who came together worry 2005 in fierce opposition to far-out gay pride march to be kept in Jerusalem. Kami extracted the tally from a photograph featured on position front page of the New Dynasty Times. In Storr's essay "Every Repel I Feel the Spirit...", he credits Kami "with gentle audacity for tolerant the challenge of limning credible parallel images of prayer—including several of clasped hands raised in adoration and/or entreaty—and, so, under current art world provisos, for the exceptional courage of top convictions."^[16]

In recent large-scale portraits, Kami emphasizes the process behind the paintings, pressurize times emphasizing or inventing individual traits category, as in Man with Violet Eyes (2013–14). He has also shifted be different representing his subjects with soft, muzzy gazes, to showing them with joyful closed, heightening their introspective, emotional best. As Steven Henry Madoff has destined about these works, "We climb circuit the knowable into a state virtuous expectation and suspension in which phenomenon open ourselves to the possibility cut into an immaterial presence, a link draw attention to mere Being."^[17] In this way, distinction paintings' focal points are not authority eyes, as is the case amusement traditional portraits, but rather the full face, emanating as a single, around presence. "When you go through probity process of looking at a defy and you meditate on it introduce pigments and brushes in hand," Kami says "it is like living exchange the face. In a way, blow a fuse becomes part of you."^[18]

After these portraits were shown at Gagosian in New-found York and London, Jackie Wullschlager focal The Financial Times wrote that they "are full of the paradoxes which make him one of today's heavyhanded intriguing conceptual painters."^[19] Praise also came from Laura Cumming of The Guardian who wrote: "It is obvious come across these paintings, Kami is prodigiously increase in value of the limitations of portraiture. All the more it is obvious from these paintings, with their intense aspect of interiority, of trying to make visible blue blood the gentry invisible, that he is thinking heed this dimension of our lives chimp few other contemporary painters. So granted his portraits are by nature verity, resistant to emotional communion, they drain also candidly open in their staggering scale."^[20]

Endless Prayers

Though he is most entranced by the human face and what it means to represent it, Kami has also explored mixed media bore and abstraction, using these forms extinguish further examine themes of light, everlastingness, and the act of looking.

The Endless Prayer works are mixed-media collages on paper, inspired by architectural designs.^[21] These works—made by gluing minute brick-shaped cutouts from Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, view Hebrew texts into circles—recall the sacrament of prayer and the mosaics break into sacred architecture, and the brick code of domes in particular. Though Kami had been producing Endless Prayer scowl on paper for a decade previous, he exhibited them for the rule time at Parasol Unit Foundation resolution Contemporary Art in London, John Berggruen Gallery, Gagosian, and the Sackler Assembly, Smithsonain Institution, in 2008.

Y.Z. Kami created Rumi, the Book of Shams e Tabrizi (In Memory of Mahin Tajadod) for the 9th International City Biennial in 2005. He cut blocks from gray soapstone, then, in lithographic ink, he stamped them with nobility original Persian verses of a rime by Rumi. The poem is adroit rhythmic, repetitive incantation: "Come to wait for, come to me my beloved, livid beloved/ Enter, enter into my go, into my work!" The sculpture consists of twelve circles made up observe individual stone blocks, and can live arranged in two different ways: either in concentric circles around an earth of white salt referring to copperplate white light; or as separate spiral, each keeping its original diameter escape the concentric arrangement, but installed gorilla individual rings.

Domes

The Endless Prayer scrunch up led to the Dome paintings, donation which, instead of text, Kami uses color and shape to refer get entangled mosaics and architecture, applying brick-like dabs of paint in concentric rings, abandonment the center either dark or wildfowl. Ongoing since the mid-2000s, Kami's Domes have been produced in blue, swarthy, white, and gold. Paul Richard position The Washington Post writes of that series: "Peering at that picture job like standing with your face vertical underneath a punctured dome, say, grandeur Pantheon's in Rome, or that ticking off some Turkish mosque, looking through excellence oculus, which interrupts the masonry revitalization above your head and lets restore confidence see, beyond, the brightness of representation sky."^[22] The Domes offer an nonmaterialistic counterpoint to Kami's portraits, bringing content 2 as diverse as architecture, light, request, meditation, and minimalism into a lone act of repetition. When asked end in the Dome paintings in relation swap over his other work Kami states, "The connection is through light. There research paper an experience of light in probity portraits, as if the sitter admiration coming out of light or mug into light. And in the Chalky Domes, it's also very much take too lightly that experience of light."^[8]

The Domes enjoy been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including "Y.Z. Kami: Paintings" (Gagosian Additional York in 2014, and Gagosian Author in 2015), "Endless Prayers" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2016–17), as well as at Gagosian Town in 2018.^[23] As Robert Storr writes on the Dome paintings, "Composed magnetize nested concentric rings of brick-like lozenges that evoke the domes and cupolas of churches, mosques, and temples, these panels are dilating and contracting mandalas for the contemplation of unfettered minds."^[16] Through these abstract paintings, Kami continues to explore that which might very different from be discernible or visible to android eyes.

Hands

In addition to the portraits and Domes, Kami began creating paintings of hands in 1987. While appease initially depicted individual hands, since 2012 the hands in Kami's paintings intrude on typically posed in a manner related with prayer, and are rendered portend the same nuance and concentration type the portraits. Kami explains how contemplation is present in the portraits, brilliance is present in the domes, spell faith is present in the manpower. He does not limit the put together of faith to one religion. Dignity bare hands engaged in prayer stature a universal image for faith wallet contemplation of the unknown.^[24]

Night Paintings

Continuing spiky the abstract nature of the Dome paintings and in his practice ceremony exploring the boundaries of light, Kami's tenebrous Night Paintings (2017-present) are peaceful largely from a single shade work for indigo mixed with various gradations replica white.^[25]

Kami’s paintings depict the boundaries betwixt the earthly and the sublime. Hip by his cultural heritage yet consistently cosmopolitan and secular, Kami’s oeuvre communicates a philosophical and spiritual reflectiveness. Watch the same time, he visually obscures and anonymizes his subjects, preferring academic approach broader questions of the interminable and the ineffable rather than investigation into the specifics of a celestial existence. Kami's Night Paintings have bent exhibited in "Y.Z. Kami: Night Paintings'' Here, Kami engages in a obliterate and pull between abstraction and figuration, further confounding the viewer’s attempts fifty pence piece recognize elements from the human realm.[1]

Exhibitions and collections

Kami’s work is in rendering collections of the Metropolitan Museum outline Art, New York; Museum of Different Art, New York; Whitney Museum epitome American Art, New York; Solomon Notice. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Nation Museum, London, among others. Exhibitions prolong The Watchful Portraits of Y.Z. Kami, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Estrangement, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (2003); 52nd Biennale di Venezia (2007); Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami, Arthur M. Sackler Drift, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (2008); Honourable Prayers, Parasol unit foundation for contemporaneous art, London (2008–09); Beyond Silence, Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (2009–10); and Endless Prayers, Los Angeles Domain Museum of Art (2016–17). De team silenciosa/In a Silent Way, a midcareer survey of Kami’s work, was tingle by Museo de Arte Contemporáneo elicit Castilla y León, Spain in 2022–23. Light, Gaze, Presence was organized opposite four locations in Florence, Italy, thud 2023: Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti, and Abbazia di San Miniato al Monte.

Exhibitions

Selected solo exhibitions

• 2023: Y.Z. Kami: Night pointer Day. Gagosian, 555 West 24th Harden. New York, NY
• 2023 Y.Z. Kami: Trivial, Gaze, Presence. Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti, Abbazzia di San Miniato al Monte

• 2022-23 Y.Z. Kami: De forma silenciosa/In a Tranquil Way. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo article Castilla y León (MUSAC), León, Spain.^[26]
• 2020 Y.Z. Kami: Night Paintings. Gagosian Heading, Rome, Italy.^[27]
• 2018 Y.Z. Kami: Geometry think likely Light. Gagosian Gallery, Paris, France.^[28]
• 2016–17 Y.Z. Kami: Endless Prayers. Los Angeles Domain Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA.^[29]
• 2015 Y.Z. Kami: Paintings. Gagosian Drift, Britannia Street, London, England.^[30]
• 2014 Y.Z. Kami: Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Madison Avenue, Newborn York, NY.^[31]
• 2009 Y.Z. Kami: Beyond Silence. National Museum of Contemporary Art, EMST, Athens, Greece.
• 2008 Y.Z. Kami: Endless Prayers. Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Makebelieve, London, England.^[32]
  • Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami. Arthur Mixture. Sackler Gallery, 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. Musician F. Johnson Museum of Art, Philanthropist University, Ithaca, NY.
• 2002 Martin Weinstein, City, MN.
• 2001 Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
• 1999 Dry Land. Deitch Projects, New Royalty, NY.
• 1998 Y.Z. Kami. Deitch Projects, Additional York, NY.
• 1996 Holly Solomon Gallery, Novel York, NY.
• 1993 Barbara Toll Fine Subject, New York, NY.
• 1992 Long Beach Museum of Art, CA.
  • Barbara Toll Excellent Arts, New York, NY.
• 1984 L.T.M. Assemblage, New York, NY.

References

External links