Y.Z Kami: Selected Works

Ab-Anbar Gallery presents the first solo exhibition by Y.Z. Kami in Iran, accompanied by the publication of an artist monograph. Produced in collaboration with the imprint, Contemporary Art Publications (Tehran) the publication Y.Z. Kami Selected Works (2018), features essays by Babak Ahmadi and Robert Storr, and is the most comprehensive publication to date made about the artist’s work. 

Born in 1956, Tehran, Kami lives and works in New York. After studying philosophy at UC Berkeley (1974-75), Kami was a student of Emmanuel Levinas at the Sorbonne (1976-81). Subsequently, he embarked on a career as a painter. As an artist, he is self-taught. While still a child, he learned his craft working alongside his Mother, who was a renowned realist painter in Iran. 

“Kami’s works have never reached abstraction to better air emotions. His favourite painter is not Kandinsky. He is not letting go of the world outside but neither does he see himself duty-bound to represent it. He has relied on his own feelings, his own emotions, his lived experiences, people around him, those he likes or wants to know, his own view of the history of painting.” “The Art of Repetition,” Babak Ahmadi. Y.Z. Kami Selected Works(2018)

Ab-Anbar’s mini survey of Y.Z. Kami’s paintings features as its earliest work, the artist’s Self-Portrait as a Child (1998),is one of a series Kami has produced a substantial body of portraiture throughout his career. Many of these works feature a frontal depiction of the sitter, head and shoulders filling the frame, engaging the viewer with a direct and open gaze. By contrast, many other works welcome the viewer with the silence of shut eyes. With the warm, flesh-toned hues of his palette and the soft detailing of his brushwork, he creates portraits of an enveloping warmth and intimacy. For Kami, painting is a medium for populating the world with the basic truth of our common humanity. 

“I admire him for attempting to make the invisible visible by presenting the visages of men and women whose gazes, averted from ours, have been directed inward. For in these pictures Kami enlists sight in the cause of introspection in a manner that contradicts the premises of most portraiture, which banks on the eyes serving as windows to the soul.” “Every Time I Feel the Spirit…,” Robert Storr

Parallel to his portraiture, the artist has also produced an ongoing series of abstract paintings. These works feature tile-like patterning in concentric circles that evoke the religious architecture of the dome. Consisting of patterns that radiate out from the painting’s centre, each one combines the pictorial language of décor, while pointing at the origins of that vocabulary in the natural world. For each work, the focal point is the viewer, configured as if looking up to the sky or into the celestial night, or gazing up to the ceiling of the temple where they worship.

Connecting the two strands of Kami’s practice is his ongoing series of paintings featuring praying hands. An homage to this symbol of devotion that bridges all faiths (see the famous work by Albrecht Dürer, for instance) these paintings are rendered using the blurred (or sfumato) brushwork technique that is also seen in many of Kami’s portraits. Kami’s use of this technique is implicitly understood as a tactile appeal to the viewer, to come closer to the painting, and also to experience the work as an immanence that expands beyond any knowledge of a specific cultural context or religious doctrine.

Y.Z Kami’s works are in many distinguished public and private collections including, but not limited to, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, British Museum and LACMA.