Y.Z. Kami

In paintings, drawings, collages, and sculptures, Y.Z. Kami explores the flux between matter and spirit, external appearance and inner life. 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. Rendered in matte oil paint on linen, these meditative images recall Byzantine frescoes and Fayum funerary portraits, locating the unknown and the infinite in material form and presence. In his abstract works, Kami extends this interplay of surface and interior through forms inspired by architecture, geometry, poetry, and, more recently, hazy, oneiric imagery.

Kami was born in Tehran in 1956. He painted from early childhood, sometimes with his mother (who worked for a time under the well-known Persian academic painter Ali Mohammad Heydarian [1896–1990]), and was exposed to both Western and Near Eastern influences, particularly the paintings of the European masters and the verses of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Persian poets. Following high school, and after a year spent in Berkeley, California, he moved to Paris. There he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne—from which he graduated in 1981—and subsequently at the Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma Français.

In 1984, Kami moved to New York, where he continues to live and work. There, he started work on Self-Portrait as a Child (1990), which marks the beginning of a series of paintings, drawings, and photographic works based on a picture of himself as a boy in Iran. Over the subsequent decade he produced multipart works, including Untitled (18 Portraits) (1994–95). A 2006 exhibition, Without Boundary at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, saw Kami starting to paint his subjects with their eyes closed or lowered, making the entire surface of the face a focal point. Other works, such as Dry Land (1999–2004), juxtapose painted portraits with photographic images of façades and buildings, the structures’ weathered surfaces underscoring a sense of lived history.