ART CITIES:Dubai-Kamrooz Aram

Kamrooz Aram was born in Iran and has lived in the United States since age eight. The artist’s diverse practice often engages the complicated relationship between traditional non-Western art and Western Modernism. Through a variety of forms including painting, collage, drawing and installation, Aram has found the potential for image- making to function critically in its use as a tool for a certain renegotiation of history.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Green Art Gallery Archive

Kamrooz Aram in his solo exhibition “Recollections For A Room” at Green Art Gallery in Dubai presents new paintings and sculptures. Kamrooz Aram’s brings together a variety of familiar motifs and symbols to make new images, and yet he does not assign fixed meanings to them. Images in his work sometimes stand strong but sometimes are almost completely obliterated. With many of his paintings made by scraping away layers of paint from the canvas rather than adding them, Aram’s subject matter, as well as his technique, remains intriguingly elusive. In the paintings of the exhibition, a pattern that has been built by repeating an isolated detail from a Persian carpet competes for dominance with a geometric pattern that one might associate with European Modernist Architecture. The paintings begin with a pencil grid, mapping out the floral forms, which are drawn in with oil crayons and then wiped away and redrawn, leaving evidence of the previous layers. Like Agnes Martin, Aram is interested in an emotional or spiritual affect in his paintings, something that has frequently been deemed taboo in art criticism. In addition to the paintings, Aram debuts a series of new sculptures exploring the significance of exhibition design in shaping our understanding of the antiquities we view in museums. An older work “Ancient Through Modern: A Collection of Uncertain Objects, Part 1” is a wall installation comprising painting, ceramics and collage. Arranged to echo the displays of Museums, the work investigates cultural nostalgia, exploring how museums serve a longing for mystical pasts. Furthermore, the artist does not provide didactic text or wall labels identifying the displayed objects, challenging the viewer to disconnect them from a typical analysis of cultural significance, authenticity, authorship and provenance. By blurring the boundaries between ancient and modern, manufactured and made, Aram reveals the prevalence of archetypes and the irrationality of how cultural value is ascribed to material objects.

Info: Green Art Gallery, Al Quoz 1, Street 8, Alserkal Avenue, Unit 28, Dubai, Duration: 13/11/16-15/1/17, Days & Hours: Sat-Thu 10:00-19:00, www.gagallery.com