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17/2/2011

Kamrooz Aram

Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York

Perry Rubenstein Gallery announces Negotiations, Kamrooz Aram’s second exhibition with the gallery. Opening on February 18th and on view through March 26th, 2011, the exhibition will introduce three new bodies of work, including paintings and collages created over the past year.

In the exhibition, Aram will present a new series of works that he refers to as flag paintings. This body of work reflects Aram’s ongoing interest in nationalist, religious and artistic ideologies. Using patterns derived from traditional Persian art forms, such as carpets, Aram works through a process of building, destroying and rebuilding these so-called “ornamental” forms on the canvas. While flags have long been present throughout Aram’s work as generalized forms in a lexicon of iconography, in this new series the paintings themselves take on the characteristics of a flag. Aram has introduced geometric forms that at once reference flag design as well as geometric abstraction, a reference to Modernist ideology and its historical conflict with ornamentation. As a result of this process, the paintings question the notion of pattern as inherently decorative, as geometry and ornamentation struggle for domination of the final image.

Also included in this exhibition is Aram’s new series of collages, 7,000 Years. In these works, the artist dissects and reconstructs pages from mid-century exhibition catalogues of Iranian art objects. When using the nostalgic phrase “7,000 years of history,” many Iranians evoke what they see as their magnificent cultural past; for some, it is a way of coming to terms with what they perceive to be a dismal present, while for others it is a way of emphasizing the nation’s glory and independence from colonial powers. Similarly, Aram views what he sees as a fixation on Modernism in Western culture generally and in contemporary art specifically, as a form of cultural nostalgia in which a glorious past is idealized and revered. The compositions in this series often evoke the Modernist reverence for geometry, bringing into question the complicated relationship between Modernism and non-Western art.

Finally, the gallery will be showing a new series of paintings titled Fana’. Fana’ is the Arabic and Persian term for erasure or annihilation and is used in mystical thought to connote self-negation. In these paintings, the idealized central form, often seen in the artist’s previous work, is a result of wiping away and sanding down the surface of the painting. The process of destroying the center of the painting results in the illusion of a central form of light.

Kamrooz Aram was born in Shiraz, Iran in 1978, and received his MFA from Columbia University in 2003. Aram has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as LAXART, Los Angeles, CA (2010); the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASSMoCA), North Adams, MA (2006) and Wilkinson Gallery, London (2006). His work has been included in international group exhibitions including roundabout (2010), the Busan Biennale (2006), P.S.1/MoMA’s Greater New York 2005, and the Prague Biennale I (2003). His work has been featured and reviewed widely in publications such as Art in America, Artforum.com, The New York Times, Asian Art Newspaper, ArtAsiaPacific, The Village Voice, and the arts and culture segment on BBC Farsi, Tamasha. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Press contact:
Andrea Serbonich - Perry Rubenstein Gallery T 212.627.8000 E andrea@perryrubenstein.com

Opening Reception, Friday, February 18, 2011, 6:00 – 8:00 PM

Image: Kamrooz Aram, Untitled (Flag #9), 2010, Oil on canvas, 72 x 84 inches (182.9 x 213.4 cm)

Perry Rubenstein Gallery
527 West 23 Street New York, NY 10011
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00 AM – 6:00PM.

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