Y. Z. Kami (born Kamran Youssefzadeh, 1956) is an Iranian born American painter based in New York City. Kami is known for referencing core concepts of different religious faiths and philosophies in his artworks. Though the subjects in his oeuvre span from painted portraits and devotional subject matter to abstract domes and architectural elements, the artist continually returns to themes of introspection, subjectivity and contemplation. Formally, Kami is in dialogue with sources as diverse as religious texts, documentary photography, minimalism, contemporary portraiture and ancient Egyptian Fayum portraits of the dead. Kami has worked in a variety of media including collage, photography, installation and sculpture, though he is mainly regarded as a painter. It was his large-scale portraits that first gained him acclaim from the international art world, leading to receptions of his artworks in various important exhibitions and biennials.
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Early life and education
Y.Z. Kami was born in Tehran, Iran in 1956. He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley in 1975 and received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Paris-Sorbonne in Paris, France from 1976-81. He continued his education at the Conservatoire Libre du Cinema (English: Paris Conservatory) in Paris, France in 1982. After living in Paris for over a decade, Kami moved to New York in 1984. He continues to live and work in New York City.
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Influences
At a young age Kami travelled frequently with his family. His experiences viewing ancient architectural structures and the vast, dry desert left a significant impression on Kami, which he later carried out into his artwork. While studying art and film in Paris, Kami attended French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas's lectures. Lévinas's ideas regarding the human face profoundly influenced Kami. In his visits to the Louvre during the same period, he discovered the Fayum mummy portraits and was impressed by their expression and gaze. Kami's inspiration by these early Egyptian portraits, as well as by Byzantine iconography, is evident in his works. His engagement in Philosophy at Sorbonne and later Film at the Conservatoire in Paris also exposed him to some of his most revered cultural personages - from Cézanne to Proust, Brancusi to Matisse, Giacometti to Genet, Corbin to Barthes and Levinas, Kami's oeuvre possesses a distinct sense of fluidity between the various faiths and texts that constitute his philosophical influences.
Other influences include 13th- and 14th-century Persian poetry, especially the writings of the Sufi poet Rumi, first taught to him by Mahin Tajadod. Tajadod is included in Kami's work, Konya (2007), a vertical collage of photographs with a single painted portrait of Tajadod, commemorating the poet's hometown. Kami draws on both Eastern and Western mystical and aesthetic traditions to explore the relationship between outward forms and the inner spirit.
Technique
Kami primarily works with oil paint, but is publicly recognized for creating the aesthetic of a dry surface, similar to those of European frescos. Kami's technique also references sacred wall paintings in Byzantine art and early Renaissance. The artist spent years experimenting with different materials, oils, dry pigments and dust to develop and maintain a balanced aesthetic. Along with the consistent subject matter in his paintings, Kami's painterly technique is another factor that defines his artwork. Speaking on his technique during The Art Channel's segment on Kami's 2015 exhibition in London, Grace Adam comments that the out-of-focus aesthetic is promoted through the artist's use of a 'Sfumato technique'. She continues, "[the artist] primes the canvas in gesso, then adds a bit of stone dust and this amazing terra cotta color - then lay[s] these beautiful colors over the top of it." This layering of color and out of focus quality characterizes Kami's recent portrait painting. Critics have said that "up close, his figures break down into abstract solidity: muddy, matte brushstrokes that resemble plaster more than paint."
Another common technique in Kami's artwork is his use of repetition. The artist finds his own meditation in painting the same sitter multiple times. Another reason for this repetition is the artist's need to extract more from the sitter after a painting is finished. He states, "But, with portraits, it's happened many times that when I finish a painting, I often feel there is more to say." After many years of painting the same sitter, Kami has realized the ability of the portrait to completely transform. This repetition is also seen in Kami's domes, in which the repeated blocks of color mimic an infinite and vibrating sphere of color.
Kami's interest in material extends beyond oil and canvas as he has experimented with various mediums including collage and stone. Kami has also produced editioned prints and site-specific installations.
Work and Career
Portraits
Kami is perhaps best known for his large-scale paintings of humble, ordinary, and often introspective sitters, which have been described as ethereal and delicate, and even meditative.
Kami's first encounter with art came at an early age, when he followed his artist mother around in her studio. Kami subsequently began painting portraits as a child as his mother was also a portrait painter. During the early years of his career, Kami's portraits were produced through direct engagement with the sitter. Kami comments on the beginning stages of becoming a portrait painter: "My mother was a portrait painter, so I have been painting portraits since I was a child. For many years I painted with a sitter in front of me: I would make a drawing first with pencil or charcoal on canvas and then paint with oil. Years later, in the mid-1980s, when I moved to America, I encountered Andy Warhol's very large portrait of Mao at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Chuck Close's large portraits, as well as Alex Katz and other American artists. And gradually I began to change the size of the heads in my paintings. Prior to that, my experiences with large portraits focused mainly on frescoes and mosaics in the churches of Europe."
During the mid-1980s Kami moved away from painting directly from sessions with the sitter to photographing the sitter and producing paintings from these images. Kami made large scale portraits which intimately focused on the human face - the works produced during this series are characterized by their direct eye contact. These portraits were produced in a larger format as opposed to his earlier work. However, as the artist notes, "as the size of the paintings grew larger, the images became a little blurred, and gradually more and more out of focus. The blurrier they became, the more abstract the experience was for the viewer when approaching the work." Kami's portraits of introspective subjects project a broad and inviting presence. Using his own photographs of family, friends, and strangers as source material, he depicts faces as vessels to convey an almost sacred and universal atmosphere of reflection and meditation. These portraits reveal Kami's deep roots in inter-religious and intercultural subjects.
In 1988, Kami traveled to Iran for the first time after many years and came across a photograph of himself taken when he was eleven. This photograph eventually became a point of reference in his work, inspiring Kami's series of self-portrait variations. Kami continued to incorporate this image of himself as an eleven year old into his work. Versions of Self Portrait as a Child have since been acquired by private collectors and an additional piece from this series is included in the permanent collection of the Guggenheim Museum.
In the early 1990s, Kami painted single portraits of male and female youths. Many of these works Untitled, Joseph, Untitled (16 Portraits) and Untitled (18 Portraits) were produced during the height of the AIDS epidemic in New York City. Scholars and critics have discussed this body of work through a lens of mourning and mortality. The portraits are both references to traditional Byzantine and Fayuum portraits and to the victims of the AIDS epidemic. Kami participated in a series of solo shows at Deitch Projects in New York between 1998 and 2001 and various group exhibitions in Europe.
Though Kami's portraits are known for their imbued sense of universality and modesty, the artist gained particular attention for his more political work, In Jerusalem (2004-05) which was included in "Think With the Senses, Feel With the Mind", curated by Robert Storr at the 52nd Venice Biennale in Italy. The work presents 5 portraits of all the prominent religious leaders - a Catholic cardinal, an Eastern Orthodox bishop, Sephardic and Ashkenazi rabbis and a Sunni imam - who came together in 2005, for once reconciled, in fierce opposition to a gay pride march to be held in Jerusalem. These figures were extracted from a news service photograph, which had at one point been featured on the front page of the New York Times. This piece has been heralded as one of the more political works in the 2007 Biennale. In Storr's essay "Every Time I feel the Spirit...", he credits Kami with gentle audacity for accepting the challenge of limning credible contemporary images of prayer--including several of clasped hands raised in adoration and/or entreaty--and, so, under current art world conditions, for the exceptional courage of his convictions."
In recent large-scale portraits, Kami emphasizes the process behind the paintings, taking mysterious liberties in his representation of individual features, as in the arresting Man with Violet Eyes (2013-14). The human face is a significant element in these paintings. The subjects in Kami's portraits seem to be deep in thought or meditating. The viewer can interpret this from the calm and tranquil facial expressions given by the subjects. In this new body of work - the sitter's eyes are now typically closed and reflect a moment of peace and contemplation. Kami states, "When you go through the process of looking at a face and you meditate on it with pigments and brushes in hand, it is like living with the face. In a way, it becomes part of you." Kami does not aim to create photorealistic portrayals; rather, he seeks to evoke the presence of spirit. Kami's celebrates the unique profundity of the face with the kind of emotional openness for us to fathom deeper. As Steven Henry Madoff writes on these portraits, "The moment of the portrait is that fact of mere Being, an ontological status, while it is also existential: It is about the actions brought into the world by each of us as agents of Being, as existents." The painter is seeking the validity in a vision of solidarity in shared experience with the viewer. These portraits were shown at Gagosian Gallery in New York and London. Jackie Wullschlager in The Financial Times writes that these portraits "are full of the paradoxes which make him one of today's most intriguing conceptual painters." Praise also came from Laura Cumming of The Guardian who wrote: "It is obvious from these paintings, Kami is prodigiously aware of the limitations of portraiture. Yet it is obvious from these paintings, with their intense aspect of interiority, of trying to make visible the invisible, that he is thinking about this dimension of our lives as few other contemporary painters. So although his portraits are by nature impermeable, resistant to emotional communion, they are also candidly open in their monumental scale."
Endless Prayers
Kami is also known for his Endless Prayers works - mixed-media collages on paper, inspired by architectural designs, and are fused with various sacred texts. Kami uses Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew texts arranged in circles to recall the ritual of prayer and the mosaics of sacred architecture which project a meditative monumentality. These works are made by gluing countless minute brick-shaped cutouts from poetry and prayer texts onto paper often in circular arrangements, but also according to specific Islamic architectural detailing of domes. Though Kami had been producing Endless Prayer works on paper for a decade prior, he exhibited these pieces for the first time at Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art in London and at John Berggruen Gallery, Gagosian Gallery and the Sackler Gallery, Smythsonain Institution in 2008. The pieces in particular were inspired by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi, whose poetry has played an important role in Y.Z. Kami's work.
Domes
Since the mid-2000s, Kami has produced series of Dome paintings which are blocks of color placed neatly close together creating a sense of vibrating light. These series have been produced in blue, black, white and gold. Kami's series of Dome paintings draws inspiration from traditional Islamic architectural detailing of domes. Paul Richard of The Washington Post writes of Kami's architectural aesthetic with this work: "Peering at that picture is like standing with your face upright underneath a punctured dome, say, the Pantheon's in Rome, or that of some Turkish mosque, looking through the oculus, which interrupts the masonry high above your head and lets you see, beyond, the brightness of the sky." The Dome series offers an abstract counterpoint to the artist's portraits, bringing ideas as diverse as architecture, light, prayer, meditation, and minimalism into a single act of repetition. When asked about the Dome paintings in relation to his other work Kami states, "The connection is through light. There is an experience of light in the portraits, as if the sitter is coming out of light or going into light. And in the White Domes, it's also very much about that experience of light."
Like his portraits, Kami's dome paintings create an aura of meditation and tranquility. These paintings were included in two solo exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery in New York (2014) and London (2015). As Robert Storr writes on these dome paintings, "Composed of 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." As such, a universal sense of spirituality is conveyed by Kami's Dome paintings, characterized by a central light that pours over countless rows of mosaic-like rectangles, hand-painted or stamped onto the canvas. This sense of an unfettered or infinite light, which almost vibrates off of the canvas conjures a state of a tranquil nirvana.
These abstract paintings connect interests as well as spiritual concerns of what might not be discernible or visible to human eyes. By making them into geometric but very fragmented forms, Kami paints the solitary and continues the introspective process of making art. Kami's paintings possess a distinct sense of breadth --between the various faiths and texts that constitute his philosophical influences; between representation and abstraction; and, most unexpectedly, between painted portrayals and life energies.
Hands
In addition to portraits and domes, Kami began creating paintings of hands in 2012. The hands in Kami's paintings are typically posed in a manner associated with prayer. Kami explains how meditation is present in his portraits, light is present in the domes and faith is present in the hands. He does not limit the association of faith to one religion. The bare hands engaged in prayer are a universal image for faith and can relate to Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, and many others.
Exhibitions and Collections
Kami's work has been collected and exhibited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London, and many other institutions worldwide. Solo museum exhibitions have been presented at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (2003); Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2008); Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London (2008); and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2009-10). His work was included in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007, curated by Robert Storr). In 2016-17 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, held a solo exhibition of Kami's work entitled Endless Prayers.
Exhibitions
Selected Solo Exhibitions
- 2016-17 Y.Z. Kami: Endless Prayers. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA.
- 2016 Y.Z. Kami: White Domes. Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai, UAE.
- 2015 Y.Z. Kami: Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London, England.
- 2014 Y.Z. Kami: Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Madison Avenue, New York, NY.
- 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 Art, London, England.
- Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami. Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
- Y.Z. Kami. John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA.
- Y.Z. Kami. Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA.
- 2003 Portraits by Y.Z. Kami. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
- 2002 Martin Weinstein, Minneapolis, MN.
- 2001 Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
- 1999 Dry Land. Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
- 1998 Y.Z. Kami. Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
- 1996 Holly Solomon Gallery, New York, NY.
- 1993 Barbara Toll Fine Arts, New York, NY.
- 1992 Long Beach Museum of Art, CA.
- Barbara Toll Fine Arts, New York, NY.
- 1984 L.T.M. Gallery, New York, NY.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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