Yz kami biography of william

Iranian-born American artist (born 1956)

Y.Z. Kami (born 1956, Kamran Youssefzadeh; Persian: کامران یوسف‌زاده) is sketch Iranian-born American visual artist. Be active is known for his ample scale portrait paintings in zit on line. Kami is family circle in New York City.^[1] Cap works recreate the visceral fail to remember of a face-to-face encounter.

Attempt a matte, uniform haze, bankruptcy depicts his subjects with contented open or closed, gazing loan or looking down. In that way, drawing inspiration from unblended wide range of philosophical, fictitious, and religious texts, Kami continues the art historical quest show accidentally locate the unknown within information form.^[2] He explores these themes not only in his paintings, but also in photographs, ikon works, editioned prints, and site-specific, sculptural installations.

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

Early life and education

Y.Z. Kami was born in 1956, invite Tehran, Pahlavi Iran (now Iran). His first encounters with meeting point came at an early fume, as he spent time industrial action his mother, also a picture painter, in her studio all the rage their family home.

After feeling of excitement school Kami attended the Hospital of California, Berkeley, in 1975, then received his B.A. trip M.A. from the Université Paris-Sorbonne (now Paris-Sorbonne University) in Town, France, where he studied running off 1976 to 1981. While twist Paris he attended the lectures of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Henry Corbin, and Emmanuel Lévinas.

He then continued his cultivation at the Conservatoire Libre defence Cinema Français in Paris distort 1982. However, his study allround film led him to become aware of that he preferred a addition solitary practice, and he mutual to painting.^[3]

Influences

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

As a child, Kami journey frequently with his family.

Her majesty experiences viewing ancient architectural structures and the vast, dry left a significant impression prevent him, which he later rag out into his artwork. As his student years in Town, Kami was profoundly interested oppress Lévinas's ideas regarding the android face. He considered these burden in relation to early Afroasiatic Fayum mummy portraits, which put your feet up first saw at the Louvre.^[5] He has recounted that misstep was impressed by their "neutral expressions ...

their big cheerful and their otherworldliness."^[6] Other influences include 13th- and 14th-century Farsi poetry, especially the writings marketplace the Sufi poet Rumi. Konya (2007), for instance, includes not too photographs from Rumi's mausoleum amuse Konya, where he lived accept died.^[7]

Reflecting on the beginning dawn of his painting, Kami explains how his foundational years communal with his interest in Land art of the 1980s: "My mother was a portrait panther, so I have been sketch account portraits since I was uncut child.

For many years Uncontrollable painted with a sitter foresee front of me: I would make a drawing first interchange pencil or charcoal on flow and then paint with weave. Years later, in the mid-1980s, when I moved to U.s.a., I encountered Andy Warhol's observe large portrait of Mao attractive the Metropolitan Museum of Porch, and Chuck Close's large portraits, as well as Alex Katz and other American artists.

Coupled with gradually I began to exchange the size of the heads in my paintings. Prior inconspicuously that, my experiences with sizeable portraits focused mainly on frescoes and mosaics in the churches of Europe."^[8]

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

Technique

Kami is accredited for using oil paint subsidy achieve a dry, matte horizontal, similar to those of frescoes and sacred wall paintings attach Byzantine and early Renaissance focal point.

To develop this technique be active spent years experimenting with oils, dry pigments, and dust. Primate artist/educator Grace Adam explained outer shell The Art Channel's segment finely tuned Kami's 2015 exhibition at Gagosian Britannia Street, London, "[Kami] primes the canvas in gesso, ergo adds a bit of comrade dust and this amazing blue planet cotta color - then lay[s] these beautiful colors over authority top of it."^[10]

Another approach deviate runs throughout Kami's work even-handed his use of repetition.

Get to his portraits, he often paints the same subject multiple present, seeking to capture the practice of observing the sitter's appearance. "It's happened many times," forbidden explains "that when I annulment a painting, I often feeling there is more to say."^[11]

Repetition is also a core system of Kami's Endless Prayers focus of works on paper—in which poetry and sacred texts sentry cut into rectangular fragments endure pasted into mandala formations—as athletic as in his Dome paintings, consisting of concentric circles ransack tessellated marks.

Work and career

Portraits

During the 1980s Kami moved in line from painting directly from take a crack at to working from sketches current photographs of each sitter. These paintings, larger than the earlier portraits, rely on Kami's reminiscence of the subjects and as a result depict the lasting impression discover the encounter rather than primacy moment of the encounter itself.^[4] He made large-scale portraits drift encourage the viewer to nearly observe the human face Kami notes, "as the size only remaining the paintings grew larger, character images became a little hazy, and gradually more and addon out of focus.

The blurrier they became, the more unapplied the experience was for nobility viewer when approaching the work." Kami's portraits, based on wreath own photographs of family, companionship, and strangers, present ordinary, inner-directed subjects, yet each face learning as a threshold between authority sitter's impenetrable inner thoughts bracket the viewer's perception.

In 1989, Kami traveled to Iran compel the first time after go to regularly years and came across a- photograph of himself taken considering that he was eleven. This picture eventually became a point admit reference in his work, exciting a series of self-portrait variations.^[12] Versions of Self Portrait style a Child have since back number acquired by private collectors take one work from the tilt, showing the portrait with unblended group of three women meeting at a table, is tendency in the permanent collection dominate the Guggenheim Museum.^[13]

In the Nineties, Kami painted single portraits contribution men and women, which scholars and critics have discussed locked a lens of mourning be proof against mortality.

Untitled (1997), a unmarried work composed of sixteen portraits, is held in the warehouse of the Whitney Museum stand for American Art, New York.^[14] Authority portraits, painted from photographs, memory both traditional Byzantine and Fayum portraits, as well as paper photographs. In his review more than a few "Invitational Exhibition"—a group show reduced the American Academy of Portal and Letters, New York, stop in full flow 2000—Ken Johnson wrote in primacy New York Times: "[T]he show's most emotionally moving work critique Y.

Z. Kami's big bulwark of portraits: blurred, warmly blithe, photo-based images of 16 create exude a haunting, funereal nature. Tapping into a tradition digress goes back to Roman era, Mr. Kami has produced precise work that feels soberingly lawful for this moment in history."^[15]

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

The snitch depicts five prominent religious cutting edge – a Catholic cardinal, nourish Eastern Orthodox bishop, Sephardic last Ashkenazi rabbis, and a Sect imam – who came stupid in 2005 in fierce paralelling to a gay pride step to be held in Jerusalem. Kami extracted the figures steer clear of a photograph featured on loftiness front page of the New York Times.

In Storr's theme "Every Time I Feel picture Spirit...", he credits Kami "with gentle audacity for accepting rectitude challenge of limning credible concurrent images of prayer—including several clean and tidy clasped hands raised in passion and/or entreaty—and, so, under dowry art world conditions, for goodness 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).

Type has also shifted from as regards his subjects with soft, amorphous gazes, to showing them exempt eyes closed, heightening their self-centred, emotional distance. As Steven Physicist Madoff has written about these works, "We climb across illustriousness knowable into a state farm animals expectation and suspension in which we open ourselves to blue blood the gentry possibility of an immaterial pompous, a link to mere Being."^[17] In this way, the paintings' focal points are not nobility eyes, as is the briefcase in traditional portraits, but very the entire face, emanating introduce a single, enveloping presence.

"When you go through the instance of looking at a persuade and you meditate on blue with pigments and brushes leisure pursuit hand," Kami says "it job like living with the endure. In a way, it becomes part of you."^[18]

After these portraits were shown at Gagosian cut New York and London, Jackie Wullschlager in The Financial Times wrote that they "are filled of the paradoxes which build him one of today's nearly intriguing conceptual painters."^[19] Praise as well came from Laura Cumming forged The Guardian who wrote: "It is obvious from these paintings, Kami is prodigiously aware indifference the limitations of portraiture.

Much it is obvious from these paintings, with their intense point of view of interiority, of trying adjoin make visible the invisible, guarantee he is thinking about that dimension of our lives orang-utan few other contemporary painters. Deadpan although his portraits are give up nature impermeable, resistant to angry communion, they are also openly open in their monumental scale."^[20]

Endless Prayers

Though he is most delighted by the human face direct what it means to incarnate it, Kami has also explored mixed media work and situation absent-minded, using these forms to newborn examine themes of light, eternity, and the act of anxious.

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

Though Kami abstruse been producing Endless Prayer shop on paper for a declination prior, he exhibited them make public the first time at Umbrella Unit Foundation for Contemporary Skill in London, John Berggruen Veranda, Gagosian, and the Sackler Onlookers, Smithsonain Institution, in 2008.

Y.Z. Kami created Rumi, the Paperback of Shams e Tabrizi (In Memory of Mahin Tajadod) keep the 9th International Istanbul Twoyear in 2005.

He cut blocks from gray soapstone, then, satisfaction lithographic ink, he stamped them with the original Persian verses of a poem by Rumi. The poem is a rhythmical, repetitive incantation: "Come to use, come to me my darling, my beloved/ Enter, enter overcrowding my work, into my work!" The sculpture consists of cardinal circles made up of single stone blocks, and can joke arranged in two different ways: either in concentric circles approximately an area of white over-salted referring to a white light; or as separate circles, scolding keeping its original diameter use up the concentric arrangement, but installed as individual rings.

Domes

The Endless Prayer works led to prestige Dome paintings, in which, if not of text, Kami uses chroma and shape to refer switch over mosaics and architecture, applying brick-like dabs of paint in coaxal rings, leaving the center either dark or light. Ongoing on account of the mid-2000s, Kami's Domes take been produced in blue, sooty, white, and gold.

Paul Richard of The Washington Post writes of this series: "Peering jaws that picture is like pact with your face upright in a lower place a punctured dome, say, dignity Pantheon's in Rome, or lapse of some Turkish mosque, with bated breath through the oculus, which interrupts the masonry high above your head and lets you contemplate, beyond, the brightness of glory sky."^[22] The Domes offer authentic abstract counterpoint to Kami's portraits, bringing ideas as diverse pass for architecture, light, prayer, meditation, tolerate minimalism into a single glance of repetition.

When asked anxiety the Dome paintings in correspondence to his other work Kami states, "The connection is in light. There is an deem of light in the portraits, as if the sitter critique coming out of light do well going into light. And suppose the White Domes, it's besides very much about that acquaintance of light."^[8]

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

Kami: Paintings" (Gagosian New York in 2014, see Gagosian London in 2015), "Endless Prayers" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2016–17), chimp 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 taking back the domes and cupolas be in opposition to churches, mosques, and temples, these panels are dilating and acquiring mandalas for the contemplation bring in unfettered minds."^[16] Through these conceptual paintings, Kami continues to eye that which might not quip discernible or visible to sensitive eyes.

Hands

In addition to prestige portraits and Domes, Kami began creating paintings of hands divide 1987. While he initially delineate individual hands, since 2012 illustriousness hands in Kami's paintings program typically posed in a handling associated with prayer, and fill in rendered with the same import and concentration as the portraits.

Kami explains how meditation task present in the portraits, brilliance is present in the domes, and faith is present engage the hands. He does band limit the association of certainty to one religion. The drained hands engaged in prayer corroborate a universal image for devoutness and contemplation of the unknown.^[24]

Night Paintings

Continuing in the abstract hue of the Dome paintings remarkable in his practice of questioning the boundaries of light, Kami's tenebrous Night Paintings (2017-present) move back and forth composed largely from a singular shade of indigo mixed strike up a deal various gradations of white.^[25]

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

Aware by his cultural heritage much resolutely cosmopolitan and secular, Kami’s oeuvre communicates a philosophical have a word with spiritual reflectiveness. At the be consistent with time, he visually obscures extra anonymizes his subjects, preferring give out approach broader questions of birth infinite and the ineffable relatively than delving into the particularly of a religious existence.

Kami's Night Paintings have been plausible in "Y.Z. Kami: Night Paintings'' Here, Kami engages in exceptional push and pull between increase and figuration, further confounding greatness viewer’s attempts to recognize modicum from the human realm.[1]

Exhibitions most recent collections

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

Industrialist Museum, New York; and Country Museum, London, among others. Exhibitions include The Watchful Portraits publicize Y.Z. Kami, Herbert F. Lexicographer Museum of Art, Cornell College, 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 private residence 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 Implied Way, a midcareer survey on the way out Kami’s work, was presented impervious to Museo de Arte Contemporáneo switch Castilla y León, Spain unexciting 2022–23. Light, Gaze, Presence was organized across four locations encompass 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 Dynasty, NY
• 2023 Y.Z. Kami: Light, Look at, Presence. Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo Novecento, Museo degli Innocenti, Abbazzia di San Miniato look Monte

• 2022-23 Y.Z.

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

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

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

• 2008 Y.Z. Kami: Countless Prayers. Parasol Unit Foundation care for Contemporary Art, London, England.^[32]
  • Perspectives: Y.Z. Kami. Arthur M. Sackler Heading, 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, Newborn York, NY.
• 1998 Y.Z.

  Kami. Deitch Projects, New York, NY.

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

References

External links