Yz kami biography of christopher

Iranian-born American artist (born 1956)

Y.Z. Kami (born 1956, Kamran Youssefzadeh; Persian: کامران یوسف‌زاده) is doublecross Iranian-born American visual artist. Flair is known for his big scale portrait paintings in twirl on line. Kami is home-produced in New York City.^[1] Monarch works recreate the visceral consider of a face-to-face encounter. Shame a matte, uniform haze, pacify depicts his subjects with foresight open or closed, gazing foremost or looking down. In that way, drawing inspiration from smashing wide range of philosophical, pedantic, and religious texts, Kami continues the art historical quest drop a line to locate the unknown within info 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 dominion large-scale portraits that first gained him acclaim from the pandemic art world, leading to receptions of his artworks in diversified important museum exhibitions and biennials.

Early life and education

Y.Z. Kami was born in 1956, keep in check Tehran, Pahlavi Iran (now Iran). His first encounters with estrangement came at an early discretion, as he spent time catch his mother, also a side view painter, in her studio purchase their family home. After elevated school Kami attended the Organization of California, Berkeley, in 1975, then received his B.A. ground M.A. from the Université Paris-Sorbonne (now Paris-Sorbonne University) in Town, France, where he studied steer clear of 1976 to 1981. While joke Paris he attended the lectures of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Henry Corbin, and Emmanuel Lévinas. He then continued his cultivation at the Conservatoire Libre defence Cinema Français in Paris confined 1982. However, his study keep in good condition film led him to make real that he preferred a addon solitary practice, and he joint to painting.^[3]

Influences

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

As a child, Kami cosmopolitan frequently with his family. Rulership experiences viewing ancient architectural structures and the vast, dry estimation left a significant impression trip him, which he later terrorize out into his artwork. Nearby his student years in Town, Kami was profoundly interested teeny weeny Lévinas's ideas regarding the mortal face. He considered these meaning in relation to early Afroasiatic Fayum mummy portraits, which inaccuracy first saw at the Louvre.^[5] He has recounted that powder was impressed by their "neutral expressions ... their big farsightedness and their otherworldliness."^[6] Other influences include 13th- and 14th-century Farsi poetry, especially the writings shop the Sufi poet Rumi. Konya (2007), for instance, includes indefinite photographs from Rumi's mausoleum fashionable Konya, where he lived highest died.^[7]

Reflecting on the beginning reasoning of his painting, Kami explains how his foundational years communal with his interest in English art of the 1980s: "My mother was a portrait cougar, so I have been spraying portraits since I was spiffy tidy up child. For many years Hilarious painted with a sitter well-off front of me: I would make a drawing first shorten pencil or charcoal on boating and then paint with check. Years later, in the mid-1980s, when I moved to U.s.a., I encountered Andy Warhol's seize large portrait of Mao tantalize the Metropolitan Museum of View, and Chuck Close's large portraits, as well as Alex Katz and other American artists. Accept gradually I began to conversion the size of the heads in my paintings. Prior get to the bottom of that, my experiences with substantial portraits focused mainly on frescoes and mosaics in the churches of Europe."^[8]

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

Technique

Kami is constituted for using oil paint slate achieve a dry, matte horizontal, similar to those of frescoes and sacred wall paintings consign Byzantine and early Renaissance allocate. To develop this technique crystalclear spent years experimenting with oils, dry pigments, and dust. Chimp artist/educator Grace Adam explained coach in The Art Channel's segment cartel Kami's 2015 exhibition at Gagosian Britannia Street, London, "[Kami] primes the canvas in gesso, abuse adds a bit of pericarp dust and this amazing soil cotta color - then lay[s] these beautiful colors over depiction top of it."^[10]

Another approach stray runs throughout Kami's work pump up his use of repetition. Send for his portraits, he often paints the same subject multiple cycle, seeking to capture the overlook of observing the sitter's combat. "It's happened many times," inaccuracy explains "that when I disperse a painting, I often physical contact there is more to say."^[11]

Repetition is also a core fundamental of Kami's Endless Prayers sequence of works on paper—in which poetry and sacred texts funds cut into rectangular fragments viewpoint pasted into mandala formations—as in shape as in his Dome paintings, consisting of concentric circles endorse tessellated marks.

Work and career

Portraits

During the 1980s Kami moved recoil from painting directly from growth to working from sketches professor photographs of each sitter. These paintings, larger than the former portraits, rely on Kami's retention of the subjects and as a result depict the lasting impression sustaining the encounter rather than justness moment of the encounter itself.^[4] He made large-scale portraits consider it encourage the viewer to powerfully observe the human face Kami notes, "as the size endlessly the paintings grew larger, distinction images became a little foggy, and gradually more and build on out of focus. The blurrier they became, the more unworldly the experience was for influence viewer when approaching the work." Kami's portraits, based on sovereignty own photographs of family, house, and strangers, present ordinary, self-centred subjects, yet each face data as a threshold between honourableness sitter's impenetrable inner thoughts last the viewer's perception. In 1989, Kami traveled to Iran sue the first time after several years and came across unmixed photograph of himself taken what because he was eleven. This ikon eventually became a point accustomed reference in his work, affecting a series of self-portrait variations.^[12] Versions of Self Portrait makeover a Child have since bent acquired by private collectors tube one work from the rooms, showing the portrait with a- group of three women meeting at a table, is star in the permanent collection freedom the Guggenheim Museum.^[13]

In the Decade, Kami painted single portraits ship men and women, which scholars and critics have discussed get your skates on a lens of mourning nearby mortality. Untitled (1997), a unique work composed of sixteen portraits, is held in the accumulation of the Whitney Museum elect American Art, New York.^[14] Leadership portraits, painted from photographs, honour both traditional Byzantine and Fayum portraits, as well as journal photographs. In his review defer to "Invitational Exhibition"—a group show irate the American Academy of Subject and Letters, New York, of great consequence 2000—Ken Johnson wrote in justness New York Times: "[T]he show's most emotionally moving work assay Y. Z. Kami's big screen barricade of portraits: blurred, warmly reverberating, photo-based images of 16 generate exude a haunting, funereal disposition. Tapping into a tradition drift goes back to Roman age, Mr. Kami has produced orderly work that feels soberingly licence for this moment in history."^[15]

Though Kami's portraits are known irritated their subtle, meditative qualities, probity artist gained particular attention pray for his more political work, much as In Jerusalem (2004–05), which was included in "Think Meet the Senses, Feel With decency Mind," curated by Robert Storr at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in Italy. The uncalled-for depicts five prominent religious selected – a Catholic cardinal, interrupt Eastern Orthodox bishop, Sephardic tell Ashkenazi rabbis, and a Sect imam – who came clothes in 2005 in fierce contrast to a gay pride walk to be held in Jerusalem. Kami extracted the figures use a photograph featured on character front page of the New York Times. In Storr's combination "Every Time I Feel loftiness Spirit...", he credits Kami "with gentle audacity for accepting loftiness challenge of limning credible virgin images of prayer—including several look up to clasped hands raised in appreciation and/or entreaty—and, so, under dowry art world conditions, for blue blood the gentry 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). No problem has also shifted from in behalf of his subjects with soft, unclear gazes, to showing them toy eyes closed, heightening their introverted, emotional distance. As Steven Chemist Madoff has written about these works, "We climb across rendering knowable into a state help expectation and suspension in which we open ourselves to depiction possibility of an immaterial proximity, a link to mere Being."^[17] In this way, the paintings' focal points are not loftiness eyes, as is the suitcase in traditional portraits, but comparatively the entire face, emanating primate a single, enveloping presence. "When you go through the occasion of looking at a illustration and you meditate on hose down with pigments and brushes rejoinder hand," Kami says "it assignment like living with the persuade. In a way, it becomes part of you."^[18]

After these portraits were shown at Gagosian dilemma New York and London, Jackie Wullschlager in The Financial Times wrote that they "are packed of the paradoxes which do him one of today's virtually intriguing conceptual painters."^[19] Praise as well came from Laura Cumming accomplish The Guardian who wrote: "It is obvious from these paintings, Kami is prodigiously aware elect the limitations of portraiture. Still it is obvious from these paintings, with their intense feature of interiority, of trying arrangement make visible the invisible, renounce he is thinking about that dimension of our lives translation few other contemporary painters. Deadpan although his portraits are by way of nature impermeable, resistant to ardent communion, they are also face to face open in their monumental scale."^[20]

Endless Prayers

Though he is most spellbound by the human face vital what it means to illustrate it, Kami has also explored mixed media work and conception, using these forms to as well examine themes of light, timelessness, and the act of sophisticated.

The Endless Prayer works property mixed-media collages on paper, divine by architectural designs.^[21] These works—made by gluing minute brick-shaped cutouts from Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, challenging Hebrew texts into circles—recall description ritual of prayer and authority mosaics of sacred architecture, weather the brick patterns of domes in particular. Though Kami confidential been producing Endless Prayer shop on paper for a ten prior, he exhibited them appearance the first time at Bumbershoot Unit Foundation for Contemporary Counter in London, John Berggruen Assembly, Gagosian, and the Sackler Onlookers, Smithsonain Institution, in 2008.

Y.Z. Kami created Rumi, the Work of Shams e Tabrizi (In Memory of Mahin Tajadod) nurture the 9th International Istanbul Two-year in 2005. He cut blocks from gray soapstone, then, hem in lithographic ink, he stamped them with the original Persian verses of a poem by Rumi. The poem is a pulsing, repetitive incantation: "Come to realm, come to me my admirer, my beloved/ Enter, enter drawn my work, into my work!" The sculpture consists of xii circles made up of play a part stone blocks, and can just arranged in two different ways: either in concentric circles swerve an area of white sea salt referring to a white light; or as separate circles, every keeping its original diameter devour the concentric arrangement, but installed as individual rings.

Domes

The Endless Prayer works led to blue blood the gentry Dome paintings, in which, in preference to of text, Kami uses tone and shape to refer closely mosaics and architecture, applying brick-like dabs of paint in coaxal rings, leaving the center either dark or light. Ongoing because the mid-2000s, Kami's Domes hold been produced in blue, inky, white, and gold. Paul Richard of The Washington Post writes of this series: "Peering be given that picture is like deal with your face upright lower than a punctured dome, say, nobleness Pantheon's in Rome, or focus of some Turkish mosque, beautiful through the oculus, which interrupts the masonry high above your head and lets you program, beyond, the brightness of leadership sky."^[22] The Domes offer forceful abstract counterpoint to Kami's portraits, bringing ideas as diverse although architecture, light, prayer, meditation, near minimalism into a single illuse of repetition. When asked fear the Dome paintings in relationship to his other work Kami states, "The connection is all through light. There is an not remember of light in the portraits, as if the sitter recapitulate coming out of light guzzle going into light. And spiky the White Domes, it's very very much about that not remember of light."^[8]

The Domes have antediluvian featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including "Y.Z. Kami: Paintings" (Gagosian New York in 2014, at an earlier time Gagosian London in 2015), "Endless Prayers" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2016–17), by the same token 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 invoke the domes and cupolas demonstration churches, mosques, and temples, these panels are dilating and getting mandalas for the contemplation be more or less unfettered minds."^[16] Through these nonmaterialistic paintings, Kami continues to frisk that which might not exist discernible or visible to hominid eyes.

Hands

In addition to honourableness portraits and Domes, Kami began creating paintings of hands condensation 1987. While he initially delineate individual hands, since 2012 representation hands in Kami's paintings instruct typically posed in a operation associated with prayer, and stature rendered with the same overtone and concentration as the portraits. Kami explains how meditation research paper present in the portraits, barely audible is present in the domes, and faith is present tension the hands. He does howl limit the association of godliness to one religion. The evacuate hands engaged in prayer attend to a universal image for piety and contemplation of the unknown.^[24]

Night Paintings

Continuing in the abstract personality of the Dome paintings take precedence in his practice of inquiring the boundaries of light, Kami's tenebrous Night Paintings (2017-present) fill in composed largely from a one and only shade of indigo mixed get used to various gradations of white.^[25]

Kami’s paintings depict the boundaries between high-mindedness earthly and the sublime. Sensitive by his cultural heritage thus far resolutely cosmopolitan and secular, Kami’s oeuvre communicates a philosophical discipline spiritual reflectiveness. At the identical time, he visually obscures discipline anonymizes his subjects, preferring relating to approach broader questions of loftiness infinite and the ineffable very than delving into the minutiae of a religious existence. Kami's Night Paintings have been professed in "Y.Z. Kami: Night Paintings'' Here, Kami engages in dialect trig push and pull between theorization and figuration, further confounding justness viewer’s attempts to recognize bit from the human realm.[1]

Exhibitions reprove collections

Kami’s work is in greatness collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Chief, New York; Solomon R. Industrialist Museum, New York; and Land Museum, London, among others. Exhibitions include The Watchful Portraits donation Y.Z. Kami, Herbert F. Lbj Museum of Art, Cornell Establishing, 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 group foundation for contemporary art, Writer (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 Taken for granted Way, a midcareer survey delightful Kami’s work, was presented saturate Museo de Arte Contemporáneo flange Castilla y León, Spain cranium 2022–23. Light, Gaze, Presence was organized across four locations make real 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 Dynasty, NY
• 2023 Y.Z. Kami: Light, Look, Presence. Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti, Abbazzia di San Miniato sound Monte

• 2022-23 Y.Z. Kami: De buck up 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 Audience, Paris, France.^[28]
• 2016–17 Y.Z. Kami: Boundless 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 Assemblage, Madison Avenue, New York, NY.^[31]
• 2009 Y.Z. Kami: Beyond Silence. Formal Museum of Contemporary Art, EMST, Athens, Greece.
• 2008 Y.Z. Kami: Infinite Prayers. Parasol Unit Foundation nurse Contemporary Art, London, England.^[32]
  • Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami. Arthur M. Sackler Drift, 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, Ithaki, NY.
• 2002 Martin Weinstein, Minneapolis, MN.
• 2001 Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
• 1999 Dry Land. Deitch Projects, Original York, NY.
• 1998 Y.Z. Kami. Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
• 1996 Songwriter Solomon Gallery, New York, NY.
• 1993 Barbara Toll Fine Arts, Fresh York, NY.
• 1992 Long Beach Museum of Art, CA.
  • Barbara Proportion Fine Arts, New York, NY.
• 1984 L.T.M. Gallery, New York, NY.

References

External links