Art Radar

Iranian-born American artist Kamrooz Aram talks to Art Radar about the relationship between architecture and the ornament in his new body of work produced for the exhibition “Recollections for a Room” at Green Art Gallery.

Since completing his MFA at Columbia University in 2003, Kamrooz Aram has developed a painting and sculpture practice that consistently probes the historically unresolved relationship between the political and the ornament in modern art history and contemporary art practice. His first exhibition in Dubai, entitled “Palimpsest: Unstable Paintings for Anxious Interiors” also at Green Art Gallery, coincided with the unveiling of another project, “Ancient Through Modern: A Collection of Uncertain Objects” at Art Dubai commissioned by the Abraaj Group Art Prize in 2014.

While very different, both exhibitions set out to raise critical questions about the possibilities of contemporary abstract painting and sculpture to engage in historical and political discussions that surpass the self-referential or autonomous grammar imposed on painting and sculpture by the dominant discourses of modern art.