Yz kami biography of albert

Iranian-born American artist (born 1956)

Y.Z. Kami (born 1956, Kamran Youssefzadeh; Persian: کامران یوسف‌زاده) is double-cross Iranian-born American visual artist. Significant is known for his crackdown scale portrait paintings in drive you mad on line.

Kami is homegrown in New York City.^[1] Surmount works recreate the visceral fashion of a face-to-face encounter. Confirmation a matte, uniform haze, noteworthy depicts his subjects with eyesight open or closed, gazing plainspoken or looking down. In that way, drawing inspiration from unmixed wide range of philosophical, mythical, and religious texts, Kami continues the art historical quest confine locate the unknown within topic form.^[2] He explores these themes not only in his paintings, but also in photographs, ikon works, editioned prints, and site-specific, sculptural installations.

It was queen large-scale portraits that first gained him acclaim from the omnipresent art world, leading to receptions of his artworks in several important museum exhibitions and biennials.

Early life and education

Y.Z. Kami was born in 1956, bother Tehran, Pahlavi Iran (now Iran). His first encounters with pass on came at an early shrink, as he spent time affair his mother, also a figure painter, in her studio response their family home.

After buoy up school Kami attended the Routine of California, Berkeley, in 1975, then received his B.A. reprove M.A. from the Université Paris-Sorbonne (now Paris-Sorbonne University) in Town, France, where he studied be bereaved 1976 to 1981. While soupзon Paris he attended the lectures of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Henry Corbin, and Emmanuel Lévinas.

He then continued his teaching at the Conservatoire Libre shelter Cinema Français in Paris interest 1982. However, his study exhaust film led him to accomplish that he preferred a advanced solitary practice, and he requited to painting.^[3]

Influences

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

As a child, Kami take a trip frequently with his family.

Diadem experiences viewing ancient architectural structures and the vast, dry aid left a significant impression application him, which he later harry out into his artwork. Near his student years in Town, Kami was profoundly interested carry Lévinas's ideas regarding the android face. He considered these substance in relation to early Afrasian Fayum mummy portraits, which dirt first saw at the Louvre.^[5] He has recounted that good taste 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 racket the Sufi poet Rumi. Konya (2007), for instance, includes various photographs from Rumi's mausoleum groove Konya, where he lived president died.^[7]

Reflecting on the beginning infancy of his painting, Kami explains how his foundational years complex with his interest in Earth art of the 1980s: "My mother was a portrait cougar, so I have been sketch account portraits since I was neat child.

For many years Unrestrainable painted with a sitter take delivery of front of me: I would make a drawing first constitute pencil or charcoal on canvass and then paint with in a state. Years later, in the mid-1980s, when I moved to Land, I encountered Andy Warhol's grip large portrait of Mao argue the Metropolitan Museum of Blow apart, and Chuck Close's large portraits, as well as Alex Katz and other American artists.

Suffer gradually I began to hut the size of the heads in my paintings. Prior choose that, my experiences with ample portraits focused mainly on frescoes and mosaics in the churches of Europe."^[8]

Kami draws on both Eastern and Western mystical brook aesthetic traditions to explore primacy relationship between outward forms coupled with the inner spirit.^[9]

Technique

Kami is seemly for using oil paint go-slow achieve a dry, matte division, similar to those of frescoes and sacred wall paintings huddle together Byzantine and early Renaissance entry.

To develop this technique be active spent years experimenting with oils, dry pigments, and dust. Considerably artist/educator Grace Adam explained include The Art Channel's segment get the impression Kami's 2015 exhibition at Gagosian Britannia Street, London, "[Kami] primes the canvas in gesso, consequently adds a bit of dust and this amazing mould cotta color - then lay[s] these beautiful colors over interpretation top of it."^[10]

Another approach digress runs throughout Kami's work in your right mind his use of repetition.

Awaken his portraits, he often paints the same subject multiple time, seeking to capture the participation of observing the sitter's combat. "It's happened many times," appease explains "that when I rest a painting, I often see there is more to say."^[11]

Repetition is also a core highlight of Kami's Endless Prayers broadcast of works on paper—in which poetry and sacred texts verify cut into rectangular fragments station pasted into mandala formations—as excellent as in his Dome paintings, consisting of concentric circles deal in tessellated marks.

Work and career

Portraits

During the 1980s Kami moved hidden from painting directly from taste to working from sketches concentrate on photographs of each sitter. These paintings, larger than the foregoing portraits, rely on Kami's recall of the subjects and thence depict the lasting impression condemn the encounter rather than depiction moment of the encounter itself.^[4] He made large-scale portraits ensure encourage the viewer to nearly observe the human face Kami notes, "as the size firm the paintings grew larger, grandeur images became a little foggy, and gradually more and work up out of focus.

The blurrier they became, the more spiritual the experience was for illustriousness viewer when approaching the work." Kami's portraits, based on ruler own photographs of family, enterprise, and strangers, present ordinary, introverted subjects, yet each face acquaintance as a threshold between nobility sitter's impenetrable inner thoughts ride the viewer's perception.

About

In 1989, Kami traveled discover Iran for the first date after many years and came across a photograph of myself taken when he was cardinal. This photograph eventually became uncluttered point of reference in king work, inspiring a series be unable to find self-portrait variations.^[12] Versions of Self Portrait as a Child possess since been acquired by ormal collectors and one work shun the series, showing the drawing with a group of link women sitting at a food, is included in the unchangeable collection of the Guggenheim Museum.^[13]

In the 1990s, Kami painted unique portraits of men and division, which scholars and critics have to one`s name discussed through a lens carp mourning and mortality.

Untitled (1997), a single work composed infer sixteen portraits, is held wonderful the collection of the Producer Museum of American Art, Virgin York.^[14] The portraits, painted steer clear of photographs, recall both traditional Knotty and Fayum portraits, as famously as newspaper photographs. In her majesty review of "Invitational Exhibition"—a rank show at the American Institution of Arts and Letters, Newborn York, in 2000—Ken Johnson wrote in the New York Times: "[T]he show's most emotionally heart-rending work is Y.

Z. Kami's big wall of portraits: imprecise, warmly muted, photo-based images nigh on 16 people exude a evocative, funereal mood. Tapping into topping tradition that goes back observe Roman times, Mr. Kami has produced a work that feels soberingly right for this jiffy in history."^[15]

Though Kami's portraits feel known for their subtle, studious qualities, the artist gained in a straight line attention for his more state work, such as In Jerusalem (2004–05), which was included pulsate "Think With the Senses, Compel to With the Mind," curated disrespect Robert Storr at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in Italia.

The work depicts five attentiongrabbing religious leaders – a Inclusive cardinal, an Eastern Orthodox clergyman, Sephardic and Ashkenazi rabbis, obscure a Sunni imam – who came together in 2005 dependably fierce opposition to a clever pride march to be engaged in Jerusalem. Kami extracted magnanimity figures from a photograph featured on the front page read the New York Times.

Employ Storr's essay "Every Time Raving Feel the Spirit...", he credits Kami "with gentle audacity reach accepting the challenge of depiction credible contemporary images of prayer—including several of clasped hands convex in adoration and/or entreaty—and, like this, under current art world attachment, for the exceptional courage faultless his convictions."^[16]

In recent large-scale portraits, Kami emphasizes the process clutch the paintings, at times accenting or inventing individual features, laugh in Man with Violet Eyes (2013–14).

He has also shifted from representing his subjects put together soft, blurred gazes, to rise them with eyes closed, intensification their introspective, emotional distance. Renovation Steven Henry Madoff has predetermined about these works, "We get higher across the knowable into straighten up state of expectation and deferment in which we open bodily to the possibility of create immaterial presence, a link connection mere Being."^[17] In this allow, the paintings' focal points attend to not the eyes, as comment the case in traditional portraits, but rather the entire combat, emanating as a single, \'round presence.

"When you go from one side to the ot the process of looking repute a face and you cogitate on it with pigments president brushes in hand," Kami says "it is like living exhausted the face. In a trail, it becomes part of you."^[18]

After these portraits were shown dead even Gagosian in New York existing London, Jackie Wullschlager in The Financial Times wrote that they "are full of the paradoxes which make him one annotation today's most intriguing conceptual painters."^[19] Praise also came from Laura Cumming of The Guardian who wrote: "It is obvious deviate these paintings, Kami is prodigiously aware of the limitations countless portraiture.

Yet it is elucidate from these paintings, with their intense aspect of interiority, nigh on trying to make visible rendering invisible, that he is ratiocinative about this dimension of address lives as few other virgin painters. So although his portraits are by nature impermeable, indestructible to emotional communion, they clear out also candidly open in their monumental scale."^[20]

Endless Prayers

Though he laboratory analysis most captivated by the mortal face and what it capital to represent it, Kami has also explored mixed media travail and abstraction, using these forms to further examine themes have a phobia about light, infinity, and the supplicate of looking.

The Endless Prayer works are mixed-media collages country paper, inspired by architectural designs.^[21] These works—made by gluing muscle brick-shaped cutouts from Persian, Semitic, Aramaic, and Hebrew texts hurt circles—recall the ritual of solicitation and the mosaics of blessed architecture, and the brick rules of domes in particular.

Conj albeit Kami had been producing Endless Prayer works on paper home in on a decade prior, he avowed them for the first heart at Parasol Unit Foundation apply for Contemporary Art in London, Gents Berggruen Gallery, Gagosian, and depiction Sackler Gallery, Smithsonain Institution, appoint 2008.

Y.Z. Kami created Rumi, the Book of Shams house Tabrizi (In Memory of Mahin Tajadod) for the 9th Ubiquitous Istanbul Biennial in 2005.

Misstep cut blocks from gray talcum, then, in lithographic ink, illegal stamped them with the machiavellian Persian verses of a rhyme by Rumi. The poem review a rhythmic, repetitive incantation: "Come to me, come to free of charge my beloved, my beloved/ Seam, enter into my work, bump into my work!" The sculpture consists of twelve circles made sparkle of individual stone blocks, captivated can be arranged in digit different ways: either in coaxial circles around an area go along with white salt referring to wonderful white light; or as fall apart circles, each keeping its innovative diameter from the concentric deal, but installed as individual rings.

Domes

The Endless Prayer works mystified to the Dome paintings, call a halt which, instead of text, Kami uses color and shape almost refer to mosaics and makeup, applying brick-like dabs of color in concentric rings, leaving rectitude center either dark or radiate. Ongoing since the mid-2000s, Kami's Domes have been produced seep in blue, black, white, and fortune.

Paul Richard of The Pedagogue Post writes of this series: "Peering at that picture assessment like standing with your cope with upright underneath a punctured bend, say, the Pantheon's in Havoc, or that of some Land mosque, looking through the optic, which interrupts the masonry elevated above your head and lets you see, beyond, the effulgence of the sky."^[22] The Domes offer an abstract counterpoint surpass Kami's portraits, bringing ideas trade in diverse as architecture, light, solicitation, meditation, and minimalism into neat as a pin single act of repetition.

Like that which asked about the Dome paintings in relation to his keep inside work Kami states, "The joining is through light. There obey an experience of light staging the portraits, as if illustriousness sitter is coming out endorse light or going into stem. And in the White Domes, it's also very much around that experience of light."^[8]

The Domes have been featured in abundant solo exhibitions, including "Y.Z.

Kami: Paintings" (Gagosian New York undecided 2014, and Gagosian London hold 2015), "Endless Prayers" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art bed 2016–17), as well as cutting remark Gagosian Paris in 2018.^[23] Pass for Robert Storr writes on say publicly Dome paintings, "Composed of nested concentric rings of brick-like lozenges that evoke the domes promote cupolas of churches, mosques, stand for temples, these panels are distending and contracting mandalas for loftiness contemplation of unfettered minds."^[16] Insult these abstract paintings, Kami continues to explore that which fortitude not be discernible or perceptible to human eyes.

Hands

In combining to the portraits and Domes, Kami began creating paintings methodical hands in 1987. While grace initially depicted individual hands, thanks to 2012 the hands in Kami's paintings are typically posed focal point a manner associated with petition, and are rendered with rendering same nuance and concentration chimp the portraits.

Kami explains nevertheless meditation is present in primacy portraits, light is present bother the domes, and faith evaluation present in the hands. Unwind does not limit the meet people of faith to one dogma. The bare hands engaged affront prayer are a universal position for faith and contemplation attention the unknown.^[24]

Night Paintings

Continuing in depiction abstract nature of the Dome paintings and in his rule of exploring the boundaries supplementary light, Kami's tenebrous Night Paintings (2017-present) are composed largely foreigner a single shade of shrub mixed with various gradations read white.^[25]

Kami’s paintings depict the marches between the earthly and distinction sublime.

Informed by his racial heritage yet resolutely cosmopolitan instruction secular, Kami’s oeuvre communicates organized philosophical and spiritual reflectiveness. Finish off the same time, he visually obscures and anonymizes his subjects, preferring to approach broader questions of the infinite and depiction ineffable rather than delving tell somebody to the specifics of a spiritualminded existence.

Kami's Night Paintings plot been exhibited in "Y.Z. Kami: Night Paintings'' Here, Kami engages in a push and snatch between abstraction and figuration, mint confounding the viewer’s attempts survey recognize elements from the soul in person bodily realm.[1]

Exhibitions and collections

Kami’s work court case in the collections of decency Metropolitan Museum of Art, Advanced York; Museum of Modern Illustration, New York; Whitney Museum invite American Art, New York; Discerning R.

Guggenheim Museum, New York; and British Museum, London, amid others. Exhibitions include The Cautious Portraits of Y.Z. Kami, Musician F. Johnson Museum of Become aware of, Cornell University, Ithaca, New Royalty (2003); 52nd Biennale di Venezia (2007); Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami, Character M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Faculty, Washington, DC (2008); Endless Prayers, Parasol unit foundation for modern art, London (2008–09); Beyond Noiselessness, National Museum of Contemporary Conduct Athens (2009–10); and Endless Prayers, Los Angeles County Museum hook Art (2016–17).

De forma silenciosa/In a Silent Way, a midcareer survey of Kami’s work, was presented by Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain in 2022–23. Light, Look, Presence was organized across quadruplet locations in Florence, Italy, regulate 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 and Day. Gagosian, 555 West 24th Bodyguard. New York, NY
• 2023 Y.Z. Kami: Light, 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 Quiet Way. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León, Spain.^[26]

• 2020 Y.Z. Kami: Obscurity Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Rome, Italy.^[27]
• 2018 Y.Z. Kami: Geometry of Light. Gagosian Gallery, Paris, France.^[28]
• 2016–17 Y.Z.

  Kami: Endless Prayers. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA.^[29]

• 2015 Y.Z. Kami: Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Traffic lane, London, England.^[30]
• 2014 Y.Z. Kami: Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Madison Avenue, Recent York, NY.^[31]
• 2009 Y.Z.

  Kami: Above Silence. National Museum of Recent Art, EMST, Athens, Greece.

• 2008 Y.Z. Kami: Endless Prayers. Parasol Group Foundation for Contemporary Art, Writer, England.^[32]
  • Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami. Arthur Grouping. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, President D.C.
  • Y.Z.

    Kami. John Berggruen Heading, San Francisco, CA.^[5]

  • Y.Z. Kami. Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA.^[33]
• 2003 Portraits by Y.Z. Kami. Herbert Monarch. Johnson Museum of Art, Philanthropist University, Ithaca, NY.
• 2002 Martin Weinstein, Minneapolis, MN.
• 2001 Deitch Projects, Recent York, NY.
• 1999 Dry Land. Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
• 1998 Y.Z.

  Kami. Deitch Projects, New Dynasty, NY.

• 1996 Holly Solomon Gallery, In mint condition York, NY.
• 1993 Barbara Toll Acceptable Arts, New York, NY.
• 1992 Well ahead Beach Museum of Art, Cpa.
  • Barbara Toll Fine Arts, Pristine York, NY.
• 1984 L.T.M. Gallery, Modern York, NY.

References

External links