Y.Z. Kami

Abstraction has always been a part of my work. 
—Y.Z. Kami

Gagosian is pleased to present Night Paintings, an exhibition of new works by Y.Z. Kami. This is his first solo exhibition in Italy, following his participation in The Spark Is You, a group exhibition organized by the Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, London, in conjunction with the 58th Biennale di Venezia this year.

Kami’s tenebrous Night Paintings (2017–) are composed largely from a single shade of indigo—said to be the color of the night—mixed with various gradations of white. Each canvas in this new series is filled with blue-whitish apparitions that float just past the limits of materiality and concrete representation. These outlines shift between seemingly solid, liquid, and gaseous states—an osseous structure melts into a milky swirl, which in turn evaporates into a coil of smoke—yet their true forms and references ultimately remain veiled beneath hazy brushwork.

With their soft edges and shimmering biomorphic patterns, Kami’s paintings limn the boundaries between the earthly and the sublime. Subtly informed by his cultural heritage yet resolutely cosmopolitan and secular, Kami’s oeuvre communicates a philosophical and spiritual reflectiveness; at the same time, 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.