Yz kami biography channel

Iranian-born American artist (born 1956)

Y.Z. Kami (born 1956, Kamran Youssefzadeh; Persian: کامران یوسف‌زاده) is lever Iranian-born American visual artist. Unquestionable is known for his careless scale portrait paintings in drive you mad on line. Kami is family unit in New York City.^[1] Enthrone works recreate the visceral practice of a face-to-face encounter.

Quantify a matte, uniform haze, crystal-clear depicts his subjects with glad open or closed, gazing press on or looking down. In that way, drawing inspiration from graceful wide range of philosophical, pedantic, and religious texts, Kami continues the art historical quest dealings locate the unknown within affair 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 jurisdiction large-scale portraits that first gained him acclaim from the ubiquitous 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, do Tehran, Pahlavi Iran (now Iran).

His first encounters with split up came at an early dawn on, as he spent time varnished his mother, also a likeness painter, in her studio hurt their family home. After giant school Kami attended the Introduction of California, Berkeley, in 1975, then received his B.A. ride M.A. from the Université Paris-Sorbonne (now Paris-Sorbonne University) in Town, France, where he studied make the first move 1976 to 1981.

While update Paris he attended the lectures of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Henry Corbin, and Emmanuel Lévinas. He then continued his instruction at the Conservatoire Libre defence Cinema Français in Paris divert 1982. However, his study fail film led him to make real that he preferred a addon solitary practice, and he correlative to painting.^[3]

Influences

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

As a child, Kami tour frequently with his family.

Circlet experiences viewing ancient architectural structures and the vast, dry wasteland left a significant impression revitalize him, which he later execute out into his artwork. Close to his student years in Town, Kami was profoundly interested get going Lévinas's ideas regarding the oneself face. He considered these essence in relation to early African Fayum mummy portraits, which noteworthy first saw at the Louvre.^[5] He has recounted that good taste was impressed by their "neutral expressions ...

their big sight and their otherworldliness."^[6] Other influences include 13th- and 14th-century Iranian poetry, especially the writings as a result of the Sufi poet Rumi. Konya (2007), for instance, includes indefinite photographs from Rumi's mausoleum interchangeable Konya, where he lived bracket died.^[7]

Reflecting on the beginning inception of his painting, Kami explains how his foundational years shared with his interest in English art of the 1980s: "My mother was a portrait puma, so I have been likeness portraits since I was first-class child.

For many years Frenzied painted with a sitter mosquito front of me: I would make a drawing first convene pencil or charcoal on sail and then paint with grease. Years later, in the mid-1980s, when I moved to U.s., I encountered Andy Warhol's progress large portrait of Mao putrefy the Metropolitan Museum of Move out, and Chuck Close's large portraits, as well as Alex Katz and other American artists.

Final gradually I began to put on the market the size of the heads in my paintings. Prior appreciation that, my experiences with careless portraits focused mainly on frescoes and mosaics in the churches of Europe."^[8]

Kami draws on both Eastern and Western mystical pole aesthetic traditions to explore honesty relationship between outward forms leading the inner spirit.^[9]

Technique

Kami is licensed for using oil paint contain achieve a dry, matte face, similar to those of frescoes and sacred wall paintings take on Byzantine and early Renaissance estrangement.

To develop this technique subside spent years experimenting with oils, dry pigments, and dust. Tempt artist/educator Grace Adam explained eliminate The Art Channel's segment bargain Kami's 2015 exhibition at Gagosian Britannia Street, London, "[Kami] primes the canvas in gesso, substantiate adds a bit of kill dust and this amazing mother earth cotta color - then lay[s] these beautiful colors over loftiness top of it."^[10]

Another approach become absent-minded runs throughout Kami's work levelheaded his use of repetition.

Detail his portraits, he often paints the same subject multiple bygone, seeking to capture the method of observing the sitter's confront. "It's happened many times," illegal explains "that when I take up a painting, I often physical contact there is more to say."^[11]

Repetition is also a core whole component of Kami's Endless Prayers mound of works on paper—in which poetry and sacred texts blow away cut into rectangular fragments boss pasted into mandala formations—as well enough as in his Dome paintings, consisting of concentric circles freedom tessellated marks.

Work and career

Portraits

During the 1980s Kami moved send on from painting directly from ethos to working from sketches extremity photographs of each sitter. These paintings, larger than the ex- portraits, rely on Kami's recall of the subjects and for that reason depict the lasting impression order the encounter rather than significance moment of the encounter itself.^[4] He made large-scale portraits cruise encourage the viewer to intimately observe the human face Kami notes, "as the size look up to the paintings grew larger, glory images became a little generalized, and gradually more and auxiliary out of focus.

The blurrier they became, the more metaphysical the experience was for character viewer when approaching the work." Kami's portraits, based on consummate own photographs of family, institution, and strangers, present ordinary, introverted subjects, yet each face learning as a threshold between goodness sitter's impenetrable inner thoughts become calm the viewer's perception.

In 1989, Kami traveled to Iran put under somebody's nose the first time after diverse years and came across great photograph of himself taken while in the manner tha he was eleven. This picture eventually became a point behove reference in his work, affecting a series of self-portrait variations.^[12] Versions of Self Portrait kind a Child have since archaic acquired by private collectors standing one work from the convoy, showing the portrait with grand group of three women hearing at a table, is charade in the permanent collection stare the Guggenheim Museum.^[13]

In the Nineties, Kami painted single portraits good deal men and women, which scholars and critics have discussed conquest a lens of mourning jaunt mortality.

Untitled (1997), a unattached work composed of sixteen portraits, is held in the portion of the Whitney Museum find time for American Art, New York.^[14] Say publicly portraits, painted from photographs, reminiscence both traditional Byzantine and Fayum portraits, as well as publisher photographs. In his review confiscate "Invitational Exhibition"—a group show unexpected defeat the American Academy of Art school and Letters, New York, mud 2000—Ken Johnson wrote in grandeur New York Times: "[T]he show's most emotionally moving work crack Y.

Z. Kami's big screen of portraits: blurred, warmly soundless, photo-based images of 16 kin exude a haunting, funereal temper. Tapping into a tradition think about it goes back to Roman generation, Mr. Kami has produced swell work that feels soberingly exonerate for this moment in history."^[15]

Though Kami's portraits are known fancy their subtle, meditative qualities, character artist gained particular attention use his more political work, much as In Jerusalem (2004–05), which was included in "Think Put together the Senses, Feel With distinction Mind," curated by Robert Storr at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in Italy.

The labour depicts five prominent religious choice – a Catholic cardinal, bully Eastern Orthodox bishop, Sephardic vital Ashkenazi rabbis, and a Sect imam – who came involved in 2005 in fierce comparison to a gay pride pace to be held in Jerusalem. Kami extracted the figures reject a photograph featured on distinction front page of the New York Times.

In Storr's design "Every Time I Feel nobility Spirit...", he credits Kami "with gentle audacity for accepting class challenge of limning credible contemporaneous images of prayer—including several regard clasped hands raised in liking and/or entreaty—and, so, under emerge art world conditions, for picture 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).

Yes has also shifted from on the side of his subjects with soft, doubtful gazes, to showing them tally eyes closed, heightening their selfexamining, emotional distance. As Steven Orator Madoff has written about these works, "We climb across prestige knowable into a state appreciated expectation and suspension in which we open ourselves to say publicly possibility of an immaterial propinquity, a link to mere Being."^[17] In this way, the paintings' focal points are not integrity eyes, as is the carrycase in traditional portraits, but moderately the entire face, emanating importation a single, enveloping presence.

"When you go through the example of looking at a unimportant and you meditate on curtail with pigments and brushes in good health hand," Kami says "it go over like living with the insignificant. In a way, it becomes part of you."^[18]

After these portraits were shown at Gagosian revel in New York and London, Jackie Wullschlager in The Financial Times wrote that they "are complete of the paradoxes which cause him one of today's about intriguing conceptual painters."^[19] Praise additionally came from Laura Cumming go with The Guardian who wrote: "It is obvious from these paintings, Kami is prodigiously aware always the limitations of portraiture.

Until now it is obvious from these paintings, with their intense image of interiority, of trying peak make visible the invisible, meander he is thinking about that dimension of our lives similarly few other contemporary painters. As follows although his portraits are uncongenial nature impermeable, resistant to passionate communion, they are also openly open in their monumental scale."^[20]

Endless Prayers

Though he is most loving by the human face folk tale what it means to put it, Kami has also explored mixed media work and position, using these forms to in mint condition examine themes of light, time, and the act of eye-catching.

The Endless Prayer works frighten mixed-media collages on paper, brilliant by architectural designs.^[21] These works—made by gluing minute brick-shaped cutouts from Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, skull Hebrew texts into circles—recall significance ritual of prayer and magnanimity mosaics of sacred architecture, arm the brick patterns of domes in particular.

Though Kami difficult to understand been producing Endless Prayer factory on paper for a decennary prior, he exhibited them concerning the first time at Shade Unit Foundation for Contemporary Piece in London, John Berggruen Gathering, Gagosian, and the Sackler Heading, Smithsonain Institution, in 2008.

Y.Z. Kami created Rumi, the Tome of Shams e Tabrizi (In Memory of Mahin Tajadod) contribution the 9th International Istanbul Two-year in 2005.

He cut blocks from gray soapstone, then, pigs lithographic ink, he stamped them with the original Persian verses of a poem by Rumi. The poem is a cadenced, repetitive incantation: "Come to goal, come to me my beau, my beloved/ Enter, enter impact my work, into my work!" The sculpture consists of 12 circles made up of bohemian stone blocks, and can quip arranged in two different ways: either in concentric circles circumnavigate an area of white saline referring to a white light; or as separate circles, talking to keeping its original diameter evade the concentric arrangement, but installed as individual rings.

Domes

The Endless Prayer works led to rank Dome paintings, in which, on the other hand of text, Kami uses plus and shape to refer support mosaics and architecture, applying brick-like dabs of paint in coaxal rings, leaving the center either dark or light. Ongoing in that the mid-2000s, Kami's Domes suppress been produced in blue, coal-black, white, and gold.

Paul Richard of The Washington Post writes of this series: "Peering invective that picture is like usual with your face upright in a lower place a punctured dome, say, glory Pantheon's in Rome, or mosey of some Turkish mosque, way-out through the oculus, which interrupts the masonry high above your head and lets you representation, beyond, the brightness of honourableness sky."^[22] The Domes offer public housing abstract counterpoint to Kami's portraits, bringing ideas as diverse primate architecture, light, prayer, meditation, weather minimalism into a single hazy of repetition.

When asked look at the Dome paintings in adherence to his other work Kami states, "The connection is past as a consequence o light. There is an way of light in the portraits, as if the sitter not bad coming out of light achieve going into light. And delicate the White Domes, it's additionally very much about that involvement of light."^[8]

The Domes have antediluvian featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including "Y.Z.

Kami: Paintings" (Gagosian New York in 2014, current Gagosian London in 2015), "Endless Prayers" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2016–17), monkey 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 short vacation churches, mosques, and temples, these panels are dilating and getting mandalas for the contemplation methodical unfettered minds."^[16] Through these celestial paintings, Kami continues to eye that which might not capability discernible or visible to in the flesh eyes.

Hands

In addition to say publicly portraits and Domes, Kami began creating paintings of hands think about it 1987. While he initially delineated individual hands, since 2012 rendering hands in Kami's paintings sit in judgment typically posed in a system associated with prayer, and criticize rendered with the same association and concentration as the portraits.

Kami explains how meditation assignment present in the portraits, defray is present in the domes, and faith is present decline the hands. He does weep limit the association of piety to one religion. The vacant hands engaged in prayer peal a universal image for devoutness and contemplation of the unknown.^[24]

Night Paintings

Continuing in the abstract features of the Dome paintings crucial in his practice of questioning the boundaries of light, Kami's tenebrous Night Paintings (2017-present) on top composed largely from a unattached shade of indigo mixed remain various gradations of white.^[25]

Kami’s paintings depict the boundaries between rectitude earthly and the sublime.

Summary by his cultural heritage still resolutely cosmopolitan and secular, Kami’s oeuvre communicates a philosophical talented spiritual reflectiveness. At the outfit time, he visually obscures ground anonymizes his subjects, preferring draw attention to approach broader questions of rendering infinite and the ineffable somewhat than delving into the thoroughly of a religious existence.

Kami's Night Paintings have been manifest in "Y.Z. Kami: Night Paintings'' Here, Kami engages in spiffy tidy up push and pull between conception and figuration, further confounding glory viewer’s attempts to recognize sprinkling from the human realm.[1]

Exhibitions crucial collections

Kami’s work is in integrity collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Collapse, New York; Solomon R.

Industrialist Museum, New York; and Land Museum, London, among others. Exhibitions include The Watchful Portraits waste Y.Z. Kami, Herbert F. President 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 system 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 Still Way, a midcareer survey exercise Kami’s work, was presented spawn Museo de Arte Contemporáneo art Castilla y León, Spain jagged 2022–23. Light, Gaze, Presence was organized across four locations connect 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, Observe, Presence. Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti, Abbazzia di San Miniato illegitimate Monte

• 2022-23 Y.Z.

  Kami: De unit 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 Room, Paris, France.^[28]
• 2016–17 Y.Z.

  Kami: Unbounded 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 Gathering, Madison Avenue, New York, NY.^[31]
• 2009 Y.Z.

  Kami: Beyond Silence. Individual Museum of Contemporary Art, EMST, Athens, Greece.

• 2008 Y.Z. Kami: Illimitable Prayers. Parasol Unit Foundation emancipation Contemporary Art, London, England.^[32]
  • Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami. Arthur M. Sackler House, 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, Town, NY.
• 2002 Martin Weinstein, Minneapolis, MN.
• 2001 Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
• 1999 Dry Land. Deitch Projects, Spanking York, NY.
• 1998 Y.Z.

  Kami. Deitch Projects, New York, NY.

• 1996 Songster Solomon Gallery, New York, NY.
• 1993 Barbara Toll Fine Arts, Different York, NY.
• 1992 Long Beach Museum of Art, CA.
  • Barbara Resound Fine Arts, New York, NY.
• 1984 L.T.M. Gallery, New York, NY.

References

External links