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In Conversation
Setsuko and Y.Z. Kami
The artists address their shared ardor for poetry, the surfaces of painting, and nature.
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.
The artists address their shared ardor for poetry, the surfaces of painting, and nature.
Y.Z. Kami and curator Steven Henry Madoff sit down in Kami’s studio to discuss the artist’s exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain. Entitled Y.Z. Kami: De forma silenciosa/In a Silent Way, the survey features portraits; images of buildings, both sacred and ordinary; a sculptural installation of loose bricks inscribed with texts; and recent dreamlike abstractions.
In celebration of the release of the monograph Y.Z. Kami: Works 1985–2018, and in advance of an exhibition of new works by the artist at Gagosian, Rome, Ziba Ardalan and Elena Geuna sat down to discuss Y.Z. Kami’s work. The conversation was moderated by Gagosian’s Kay Pallister.
An exhibition at Gagosian, Paris, is raising funds to aid in the reconstruction of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris following the devastating fire of April 2019. Gagosian directors Serena Cattaneo Adorno and Jean-Olivier Després spoke to Jennifer Knox White about the generous response of artists and others, and what the restoration of this iconic structure means across the world.
Elena Geuna interviews the artist on the subjects of his childhood, his approach to portraiture, and the centrality of light in his practice.
The Summer 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Afrylic by Ellen Gallagher on its cover.
Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century mathematician and philosopher, served as a crucial inspiration for Y.Z. Kami’s newest body of work. Angela Brown examines Pascal’s ideas and their relevance to these portraits and Dome paintings.
Y.Z. Kami and Peter Marino discuss the power of bronze, the current state of architecture, and the infinite.
During preparations for an exhibition in London, Y.Z. Kami met with Gagosian’s Alison McDonald to discuss the evolution of his work, technique, and his combination of influences.
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