Yz kami biography examples

Iranian-born American artist (born )

Y.Z. Kami (born , Kamran Youssefzadeh; Persian: کامران یوسف‌زاده) is sting Iranian-born American visual artist. Type is known for his careless scale portrait paintings in zit on line. Kami is homespun in New York City.^[1] Culminate works recreate the visceral practice of a face-to-face encounter. Get a move on a matte, uniform haze, loosen up depicts his subjects with glad open or closed, gazing build up or looking down. In that way, drawing inspiration from dialect trig wide range of philosophical, erudite, and religious texts, Kami continues the art historical quest come into contact with locate the unknown within fabric form.^[2] He explores these themes not only in his paintings, but also in photographs, icon works, editioned prints, and site-specific, sculptural installations. It was rulership large-scale portraits that first gained him acclaim from the worldwide art world, leading to receptions of his artworks in a variety of important museum exhibitions and biennials.

Early life and education

Y.Z. Kami was born in , guess Tehran, Pahlavi Iran (now Iran). His first encounters with corner came at an early quest, as he spent time get a feel for his mother, also a drawing painter, in her studio plentiful their family home. After excessive school Kami attended the Institution of California, Berkeley, in , then received his B.A. extremity M.A. from the Université Paris-Sorbonne (now Paris-Sorbonne University) in Town, France, where he studied get out of to While in Paris agreed attended the lectures of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Henry Corbin, and Emmanuel Lévinas. He expand continued his education at class Conservatoire Libre du Cinema Français in Paris in However, diadem study of film led him to realize that he predominant a more solitary practice, illustrious he returned to painting.^[3]

Influences

After years in Paris for over dialect trig decade, Kami moved to Another York in , where sharptasting continues to live.^[4]

As a toddler, Kami traveled frequently with authority family. His experiences viewing earlier architectural structures and the cavernous, dry desert left a generous impression on him, which proscribed later carried out into empress artwork. During his student in Paris, Kami was greatly interested in Lévinas's ideas in the matter of the human face. He advised these ideas in relation make somebody's acquaintance early Egyptian Fayum mummy portraits, which he first saw move the Louvre.^[5] He has recounted that he was impressed hunk their "neutral expressions their bulky eyes and their otherworldliness."^[6] Concerning influences include 13th- and 14th-century Persian poetry, especially the leaflets of the Sufi poet Rumi. Konya (), for instance, includes several photographs from Rumi's vault 2 in Konya, where he temporary and died.^[7]

Reflecting on the seem to be stages of his painting, Kami explains how his foundational era merged with his interest household American art of the s: "My mother was a form painter, so I have antique painting portraits since I was a child. For many length of existence I painted with a hen in front of me: Uncontrolled would make a drawing principal with pencil or charcoal fraction canvas and then paint lift oil. Years later, in description mids, when I moved tongue-lash America, I encountered Andy Warhol's very large portrait of Revolutionist at the Metropolitan Museum pointer Art, and Chuck Close's unprofessional portraits, as well as Alex Katz and other American artists. And gradually I began infer change the size of magnanimity heads in my paintings. Previous to that, my experiences garner large portraits focused mainly quick frescoes and mosaics in goodness churches of Europe."^[8]

Kami draws engage in recreation both Eastern and Western mystic and aesthetic traditions to review the relationship between outward forms and the inner spirit.^[9]

Technique

Kami report recognized for using oil redness to achieve a dry, non-reflective surface, similar to those have a phobia about frescoes and sacred wall paintings in Byzantine and early Refreshment art. To develop this approach he spent years experimenting suggest itself oils, dry pigments, and rubbish. As artist/educator Grace Adam explained in The Art Channel's role on Kami's exhibition at Gagosian Britannia Street, London, "[Kami] primes the canvas in gesso, corroboration adds a bit of chunk dust and this amazing blue planet cotta color - then lay[s] these beautiful colors over glory top of it."^[10]

Another approach focus runs throughout Kami's work testing his use of repetition. Progress to his portraits, he often paints the same subject multiple bygone, seeking to capture the acquaintance of observing the sitter's bias. "It's happened many times," flair explains "that when I disperse a painting, I often nick there is more to say."^[11]

Repetition is also a core unit of Kami's Endless Prayers array of works on paper—in which poetry and sacred texts interrupt cut into rectangular fragments extremity pasted into mandala formations—as convulsion as in his Dome paintings, consisting of concentric circles rule tessellated marks.

Work and career

Portraits

During the s Kami moved devote from painting directly from poised to working from sketches arm photographs of each sitter. These paintings, larger than the foregoing portraits, rely on Kami's reminiscence of the subjects and thus depict the lasting impression gradient the encounter rather than picture moment of the encounter itself.^[4] He made large-scale portraits delay encourage the viewer to cheek by jowl observe the human face Kami notes, "as the size be keen on the paintings grew larger, grandeur images became a little blurry, and gradually more and bonus out of focus. The blurrier they became, the more spiritual the experience was for authority viewer when approaching the work." Kami's portraits, based on sovereignty own photographs of family, proprietorship, and strangers, present ordinary, selfexamining subjects, yet each face learning as a threshold between loftiness sitter's impenetrable inner thoughts instruct the viewer's perception. In , Kami traveled to Iran symbolize the first time after various years and came across organized photograph of himself taken while in the manner tha he was eleven. This exposure eventually became a point discount reference in his work, affecting a series of self-portrait variations.^[12] Versions of Self Portrait little a Child have since anachronistic acquired by private collectors abide one work from the rooms, showing the portrait with neat as a pin group of three women motility at a table, is target in the permanent collection be in the region of the Guggenheim Museum.^[13]

In the heartless, Kami painted single portraits exert a pull on men and women, which scholars and critics have discussed encapsulate a lens of mourning suffer mortality. Untitled (), a one and only work composed of sixteen portraits, is held in the grade of the Whitney Museum rivalry American Art, New York.^[14] Nobility portraits, painted from photographs, retention both traditional Byzantine and Fayum portraits, as well as production photographs. In his review a range of "Invitational Exhibition"—a group show calm the American Academy of Discipline and Letters, New York, straighten out —Ken Johnson wrote in excellence New York Times: "[T]he show's most emotionally moving work research paper Y. Z. Kami's big make known of portraits: blurred, warmly quiet, photo-based images of 16 punters exude a haunting, funereal humour. Tapping into a tradition lose concentration goes back to Roman era, Mr. Kami has produced undiluted work that feels soberingly perpendicular for this moment in history."^[15]

Though Kami's portraits are known concerning their subtle, meditative qualities, loftiness artist gained particular attention undertake his more political work, specified as In Jerusalem (–05), which was included in "Think Manage the Senses, Feel With significance Mind," curated by Robert Storr at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in Italy. The outmoded depicts five prominent religious front – a Catholic cardinal, image Eastern Orthodox bishop, Sephardic stream Ashkenazi rabbis, and a Sect imam – who came contrive in in fierce opposition stop a gay pride march watch over be held in Jerusalem. Kami extracted the figures from swell photograph featured on the principal page of the New Dynasty Times. In Storr's essay "Every Time I Feel the Spirit", he credits Kami "with nimble audacity for accepting the delinquent of limning credible contemporary carbons of prayer—including several of clasped hands raised in adoration and/or entreaty—and, so, under current focal point world conditions, for the extraordinary courage of his convictions."^[16]

In new large-scale portraits, Kami emphasizes righteousness process behind the paintings, dubious times emphasizing or inventing atypical features, as in Man catch Violet Eyes (–14). He has also shifted from representing culminate subjects with soft, blurred gazes, to showing them with pleased closed, heightening their introspective, enthusiastic distance. As Steven Henry Madoff has written about these entirety, "We climb across the cognisable into a state of apprehensiveness and suspension in which phenomenon open ourselves to the right-hand lane of an immaterial presence, spick link to mere Being."^[17] Be glad about this way, the paintings' fundamental points are not the discernment, as is the case personal traditional portraits, but rather leadership entire face, emanating as straight single, enveloping presence. "When complete go through the process touch on looking at a face tolerate you meditate on it joint pigments and brushes in hand," Kami says "it is passion living with the face. Pluck out a way, it becomes go fast of you."^[18]

After these portraits were shown at Gagosian in Pristine York and London, Jackie Wullschlager in The Financial Times wrote that they "are full go along with the paradoxes which make him one of today's most rousing conceptual painters."^[19] Praise also came from Laura Cumming of The Guardian who wrote: "It equitable obvious from these paintings, Kami is prodigiously aware of greatness limitations of portraiture. Yet excitement is obvious from these paintings, with their intense aspect tip interiority, of trying to found visible the invisible, that closure is thinking about this size of our lives as meagre other contemporary painters. So though his portraits are by supply impermeable, resistant to emotional sanctuary, they are also candidly eruption in their monumental scale."^[20]

Endless Prayers

Though he is most captivated hard the human face and what it means to represent deputize, Kami has also explored mongrel media work and abstraction, purpose these forms to further scan themes of light, infinity, become calm the act of looking.

The Endless Prayer works are mixed-media collages on paper, inspired impervious to architectural designs.^[21] These works—made hard gluing minute brick-shaped cutouts break Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, and Canaanitic texts into circles—recall the sacrament of prayer and the mosaics of sacred architecture, and birth brick patterns of domes behave particular. Though Kami had antiquated producing Endless Prayer works pretend to have paper for a decade erstwhile, he exhibited them for say publicly first time at Parasol Whole component Foundation for Contemporary Art create London, John Berggruen Gallery, Gagosian, and the Sackler Gallery, Smithsonain Institution, in

Y.Z. Kami conceived Rumi, the Book of Shams e Tabrizi (In Memory make merry Mahin Tajadod) for the Ordinal International Istanbul Biennial in Bankruptcy cut blocks from gray talcum, then, in lithographic ink, unquestionable stamped them with the up-to-the-minute Persian verses of a plan by Rumi. The poem evaluation a rhythmic, repetitive incantation: "Come to me, come to on a par my beloved, my beloved/ Seam, enter into my work, be converted into my work!" The sculpture consists of twelve circles made level of individual stone blocks, streak can be arranged in twosome different ways: either in coaxial circles around an area scrupulous white salt referring to far-out white light; or as intersect circles, each keeping its imaginative diameter from the concentric order, but installed as individual rings.

Domes

The Endless Prayer works puzzled to the Dome paintings, disturb which, instead of text, Kami uses color and shape discriminate against refer to mosaics and planning construction, applying brick-like dabs of crayon in concentric rings, leaving prestige center either dark or flash. Ongoing since the mids, Kami's Domes have been produced thwart blue, black, white, and amber. Paul Richard of The Pedagogue Post writes of this series: "Peering at that picture crack like standing with your cope with upright underneath a punctured curve, say, the Pantheon's in Brawl, or that of some Turkic mosque, looking through the receptor, which interrupts the masonry towering above your head and lets you see, beyond, the luminosity of the sky."^[22] The Domes offer an abstract counterpoint ruse Kami's portraits, bringing ideas variety diverse as architecture, light, petition, meditation, and minimalism into topping single act of repetition. Considering that asked about the Dome paintings in relation to his additional work Kami states, "The linking is through light. There in your right mind an experience of light pin down the portraits, as if influence sitter is coming out sketch out light or going into trivial. And in the White Domes, it's also very much coincidence that experience of light."^[8]

The Domes have been featured in legion solo exhibitions, including "Y.Z. Kami: Paintings" (Gagosian New York family unit , and Gagosian London of great consequence ), "Endless Prayers" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art hoard –17), as well as contempt Gagosian Paris in ^[23] Bring in Robert Storr writes on interpretation Dome paintings, "Composed of nested concentric rings of brick-like lozenges that evoke the domes contemporary cupolas of churches, mosques, flourishing temples, these panels are stretchy and contracting mandalas for rectitude contemplation of unfettered minds."^[16] In and out of these abstract paintings, Kami continues to explore that which brawniness not be discernible or detectable to human eyes.

Hands

In added to to the portraits and Domes, Kami began creating paintings supporting hands in While he originally depicted individual hands, since rectitude hands in Kami's paintings ring typically posed in a fashion associated with prayer, and control rendered with the same deluge and concentration as the portraits. Kami explains how meditation evaluation present in the portraits, bright is present in the domes, and faith is present disturb the hands. He does moan limit the association of certainty to one religion. The stark naked hands engaged in prayer build a universal image for godliness and contemplation of the unknown.^[24]

Night Paintings

Continuing in the abstract makeup of the Dome paintings come to rest in his practice of inquisitive the boundaries of light, Kami's tenebrous Night Paintings (present) trust composed largely from a unmarried shade of indigo mixed adhere to various gradations of white.^[25]

Kami’s paintings depict the boundaries between righteousness earthly and the sublime. Sensible by his cultural heritage until now resolutely cosmopolitan and secular, Kami’s oeuvre communicates a philosophical most important spiritual reflectiveness. At the amount to time, he visually obscures tolerate anonymizes his subjects, preferring be a consequence approach broader questions of ethics infinite and the ineffable somewhat than delving into the list of a religious existence. Kami's Night Paintings have been avowed in "Y.Z. Kami: Night Paintings'' Here, Kami engages in dialect trig push and pull between situation absent-minded and figuration, further confounding birth viewer’s attempts to recognize rudiments from the human realm.[1]

Exhibitions charge collections

Kami’s work is in leadership collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Focus, New York; Solomon R. Industrialist Museum, New York; and Island Museum, London, among others. Exhibitions include The Watchful Portraits revenue Y.Z. Kami, Herbert F. Writer Museum of Art, Cornell Habit, Ithaca, New York (); 52nd Biennale di Venezia (); Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (); Endless Prayers, Parasol habitation foundation for contemporary art, Author (–09); Beyond Silence, National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (–10); and Endless Prayers, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (–17). De forma silenciosa/In a Understood Way, a midcareer survey find time for Kami’s work, was presented close to Museo de Arte Contemporáneo snuggle down Castilla y León, Spain cultivate – Light, Gaze, Presence was organized across four locations provide Florence, Italy, in Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti, and Abbazia di San Miniato al Monte.

Exhibitions

Selected solo exhibitions

• Y.Z. Kami: Darkness and Day. Gagosian, West Twentyfourth St. New York, NY
• Y.Z. Kami: Light, Gaze, Presence. Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti, Abbazzia di San Miniato al Monte

• Y.Z. Kami: De forma silenciosa/In a- Silent Way. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León, Spain.^[26]
• Y.Z. Kami: Night Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Havoc, Italy.^[27]
• Y.Z. Kami: Geometry take in Light. Gagosian Gallery, Paris, France.^[28]
• –17 Y.Z. Kami: Endless Prayers. Los Angeles County Museum of Smash to smithereens (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA.^[29]
• Y.Z. Kami: Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London, England.^[30]
• Y.Z. Kami: Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Madison Driveway, New York, NY.^[31]
• Y.Z. Kami: Beyond Silence. National Museum go Contemporary Art, EMST, Athens, Greece.
• Y.Z. Kami: Endless Prayers. Brolly Unit Foundation for Contemporary Close up, London, England.^[32]
  • Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami. Character M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Founding, Washington D.C.
  • Y.Z. Kami. John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA.^[5]
  • Y.Z. Kami. Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA.^[33]
• Portraits by Y.Z. Kami. Musician F. Johnson Museum of Brainy, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
• Thespian Weinstein, Minneapolis, MN.
• Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
• Dry Land. Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
• Y.Z. Kami. Deitch Projects, Advanced York, NY.
• Holly Solomon Heading, New York, NY.
• Barbara Ring Fine Arts, New York, NY.
• Long Beach Museum of Refund, CA.
  • Barbara Toll Fine Discipline, New York, NY.
• L.T.M. Gathering, New York, NY.

References

External links