Yz kami biography

Iranian-born American artist (born )

Y.Z. Kami (born , Kamran Youssefzadeh; Persian: کامران یوسف‌زاده) is an Iranian-born American visual artist. He is known for his huge scale portrait paintings in oil on line.

Photo: Rob McKeever. In paintings, drawings, collages, and sculptures, Y. Kami explores the flux between matter and essence, external appearance and inner experience. In large-scale portraits based on his own photographs, he restages face-to-face encounters, using sfumato to depict family, friends, and strangers with eyes open or closed, gazing straight ahead or looking down.

Kami is based in New York City.^[1] His works recreate the visceral experience of a face-to-face encounter. Through a matte, uniform haze, he depicts his subjects with eyes expose or closed, gazing forward or looking down.

In this way, drawing inspiration from a spacious range of philosophical, literary, and religious texts, Kami continues the art historical quest to locate the unknown within material form.^[2] He explores these themes not only in his paintings, but also in photographs, collage works, editioned prints, and site-specific, sculptural installations.

It was his large-scale portraits that first gained him acclaim from the international art world, leading to receptions of his artworks in various vital museum exhibitions and biennials.

Early life and education

Y.Z. Kami was born in , in Tehran, Pahlavi Iran (now Iran).

His first encounters with art came at an early age, as he spent time with his mother, also a portrait painter, in her studio in their family home. After high university Kami attended the University of California, Berkeley, in , then received his B.A.

and M.A. from the Université Paris-Sorbonne (now Paris-Sorbonne University) in Paris, France, where he studied from to While in Paris he attended the lectures of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Henry Corbin, and Emmanuel Lévinas.

He then continued his education at the Conservatoire Libre du Cinema Français in Paris in However, his analyze of film led him to realize that he preferred a more solitary practice, and he returned to painting.^[3]

Influences

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

As a child, Kami traveled frequently with his family.

His experiences viewing ancient architectural structures and the vast, barren desert left a significant feeling on him, which he later carried out into his artwork. During his student years in Paris, Kami was profoundly interested in Lévinas's ideas regarding the human face.

He considered these ideas in relation to preceding Egyptian Fayum mummy portraits, which he first saw at the Louvre.^[5] He has recounted that he was impressed by their "neutral expressions their big eyes and their otherworldliness."^[6] Other influences include 13th- and 14th-century Persian poetry, especially the writings of the Sufi poet Rumi.

Konya (), for instance, includes several photographs from Rumi's mausoleum in Konya, where he lived and died.^[7]

Reflecting on the beginning stages of his painting, Kami explains how his foundational years combined with his interest in American art of the s: "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 mids, 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 convert the size of the heads in my paintings. Prior to that, my experiences with big portraits focused mainly on frescoes and mosaics in the churches of Europe."^[8]

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

Technique

Kami is established for using oil paint to achieve a dry, matte surface, similar to those of frescoes and sacred wall paintings in Byzantine and early Renaissance art.

To develop this technique he spent years experimenting with oils, dry pigments, and dust. As artist/educator Grace Adam explained in The Art Channel's segment on Kami's exhibition at Gagosian Britannia Street, London, "[Kami] 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 highest of it."^[10]

Another approach that runs throughout Kami's work is his use of repetition.

For his portraits, he often paints the same subject multiple times, pursuing to capture the experience of observing the sitter's face. "It's happened many times," he explains "that when I finish a painting, I often feel there is more to say."^[11]

Repetition is also a core element of Kami's Endless Prayers series of works on paper—in which poetry and sacred texts are sever into rectangular fragments and pasted into mandala formations—as well as in his Dome paintings, consisting of concentric circles of tessellated marks.

Work and career

Portraits

During the s Kami moved away from painting directly from life to working from sketches and photographs of each sitter. These paintings, larger than the previous portraits, rely on Kami's memory of the subjects and therefore depict the lasting impression of the encounter rather than the moment of the encounter itself.^[4] He made large-scale portraits that support the viewer to closely observe the human face Kami 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, based on his control photographs of family, friends, and strangers, present ordinary, introspective subjects, yet each face acts as a threshold between the sitter's impenetrable inner thoughts and the viewer's perception.

In , 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 a series of self-portrait variations.^[12] Versions of Self Portrait as a Child have since been acquired by private collectors and one work from the series, displaying the portrait with a organization of three women sitting at a table, is included in the permanent collection of the Guggenheim Museum.^[13]

In the s, Kami painted single portraits of men and women, which scholars and critics have discussed through a lens of mourning and mortality.

Kami The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica There is a lot of very heavy paraphrasing in this post, and also a lot of unnecessary information on the work. From this publish I have no idea how this relates to your proposal in any way.

Untitled (), a single work composed of sixteen portraits, is held in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Novel York.^[14] The portraits, painted from photographs, recall both traditional Byzantine and Fayum portraits, as good as newspaper photographs.

In his review of "Invitational Exhibition"—a community show at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Modern York, in —Ken Johnson wrote in the New York Times: "[T]he show's most emotionally moving work is Y. Z. Kami's big wall of portraits: blurred, warmly muted, photo-based images of 16 people exude a haunting, funereal mood.

Tapping into a tradition that goes back to Roman times, Mr. Kami has produced a work that feels soberingly right for this moment in history."^[15]

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

The work depicts five prominent religious leaders – a Catholic cardinal, an Eastern Orthodox bishop, Sephardic and Ashkenazi rabbis, and a Sunni imam – who came together in in fierce opposition to a gay movement march to be held in Jerusalem.

Kami extracted the figures from a photograph featured on the front page of the New York Times. In Storr's essay "Every Time I Notice 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."^[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 (–14).

He has also shifted from representing his subjects with mild , blurred gazes, to showing them with eyes closed, heightening their introspective, emotional distance. As Steven Henry Madoff has written about these works, "We climb across the knowable into a declare of expectation and suspension in which we open ourselves to the possibility of an immaterial presence, a link to mere Being."^[17] In this way, the paintings' focal points are not the eyes, as is the case in traditional portraits, but rather the entire face, emanating as a single, enveloping presence.

"When you go through the process of looking at a face and you meditate on it with pigments and brushes in hand," Kami says "it is like living with the face.

He is known for his large scale portrait paintings in oil on line. Kami is based in New York City. Through a matte, uniform haze, he depicts his subjects with eyes open or closed, gazing forward or looking down. In this way, drawing inspiration from a wide range of philosophical, literary, and religious texts, Kami continues the art historical quest to locate the unknown within material form.

In a way, it becomes part of you."^[18]

After these portraits were shown at Gagosian in New York and London, Jackie Wullschlager in The Financial Times wrote that they "are full of the paradoxes which make him one of today's most intriguing conceptual painters."^[19] Praise also came from Laura Cumming of The Guardian who wrote: "It is apparent 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 apparent 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."^[20]

Endless Prayers

Though he is most captivated by the human face and what it means to represent it, Kami has also explored mixed media work and abstraction, using these forms to further examine themes of light, infinity, and the act of looking.

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

Though Kami had been producing Endless Prayer works on document for a decade prior, he exhibited them for the first time at Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art in London, John Berggruen Gallery, Gagosian, and the Sackler Gallery, Smithsonain Institution, in

Y.Z.

Kami created Rumi, the Book of Shams e Tabrizi (In Memory of Mahin Tajadod) for the 9th International Istanbul Biennial in He trim blocks from gray soapstone, then, in lithographic ink, he stamped them with the original Persian verses of a poem by Rumi.

The poem is a rhythmic, repetitive incantation: "Come to me, come to me my beloved, my beloved/ Enter, infiltrate into my work, into my work!" The sculpture consists of twelve circles made up of individual stone blocks, and can be arranged in two distinct ways: either in concentric circles around an area of pale salt referring to a alabaster light; or as separate circles, each keeping its original diameter from the concentric arrangement, but installed as individual rings.

Domes

The Endless Prayer works led to the Dome paintings, in which, instead of text, Kami uses color and shape to point to to mosaics and architecture, applying brick-like dabs of paint in concentric rings, leaving the center either dark or light.

Carried on since the mids, Kami's Domes have been produced in cerulean, black, white, and gold. Paul Richard of The Washington Post writes of this series: "Peering at that picture is prefer standing with your face upright underneath a punctured dome, speak, 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."^[22] The Domes present an abstract counterpoint to Kami's portraits, bringing ideas as diverse as architecture, light, prayer, meditation, and minimalism into a available act of repetition.

When asked about the Dome paintings in relation to his other function Kami states, "The connection is through light. There is an experience of light in the portraits, as if the sitter is coming out of illumination or going into light.

And in the White Domes, it's also very much about that experience of light."^[8]

The Domes contain been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including "Y.Z. Kami: Paintings" (Gagosian New York in , and Gagosian London in ), "Endless Prayers" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art in –17), as well as at Gagosian Paris in ^[23] As Robert Storr writes on the 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."^[16] Through these abstract paintings, Kami continues to explore that which might not be discernible or visible to human eyes.

Hands

In addition to the portraits and Domes, Kami began creating paintings of hands in While he initially depicted individual hands, since the hands in Kami's paintings are typically posed in a manner paired with prayer, and are rendered with the same nuance and concentration as the portraits.

Kami explains how meditation is show in the 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 contemplation of the unknown.^[24]

Night Paintings

Continuing in the abstract nature of the Dome paintings and in his practice of exploring the boundaries of light, Kami's tenebrous Night Paintings (present) are serene largely from a single shade of indigo mixed with various gradations of white.^[25]

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

Informed by his cultural heritage yet resolutely cosmopolitan and secular, Kami’s oeuvre communicates a philosophical and spiritual reflectiveness. At the same moment, he visually obscures and anonymizes his subjects, preferring to approach broader questions of the infinite and the ineffable rather than delving into the specifics of a religious existence.

Kami's Overnight Paintings have been exhibited in "Y.Z. Kami: Night Paintings'' Here, Kami engages in a thrust and pull between abstraction and figuration, further confounding the viewer’s attempts to recognize elements from the human realm.[1]

Exhibitions and collections

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

Guggenheim Museum, New York; and British Museum, London, among others. Exhibitions comprise The Watchful Portraits of Y.Z. Kami, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (); 52nd Biennale di Venezia (); Perspectives: Y.Z.

Kami, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (); Endless Prayers, Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, London (–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 Silent Way, a midcareer survey of Kami’s work, was presented by Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain in – Light, Gaze, Presence was organized across four locations in 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: Night and Day. Gagosian, West 24th 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: Nighttime Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Rome, Italy.^[27]
• Y.Z.

  Kami: Geometry of Light. Gagosian Gallery, Paris, France.^[28]

• –17 Y.Z. Kami: Endless Prayers. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA.^[29]
• Y.Z. Kami: Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Highway, London, England.^[30]
• Y.Z.

  Kami: Paintings. Gagosian Gallery, Madison Avenue, Brand-new York, NY.^[31]

• Y.Z. Kami: Beyond Silence. National Museum of Contemporary Art, EMST, Athens, Greece.
• Y.Z. Kami: Endless Prayers. Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London, England.^[32]
  • Perspectives: Y.Z.

    Kami. Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 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. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

• Martin Weinstein, Minneapolis, MN.
• Deitch Projects, Brand-new York, NY.
• Dry Land. Deitch Projects, New York, NY.
• Y.Z.

  Kami. Deitch Projects, New York, NY.

• Holly Solomon Gallery, Recent York, NY.
• Barbara Toll Decent Arts, New York, NY.
• Extended Beach Museum of Art, CA.
  • Barbara Toll Fine Arts, Modern York, NY.
• L.T.M.

  Gallery, Brand-new York, NY.

References

External links