Kamrooz Aram, A Monument for Living in Defeat, 2016
Over the last few years, Kamrooz Aram’s paintings have sought to rehabilitate the status of ornament and pattern within modernist aesthetics. Challenging the epithet ‘decorative’, Aram uses ornament conceptually, orchestrating encounters in paint between two distinct types – a repeated floral motif isolated from a Persian carpet, and simple geometric shapes and patterns that recall key moments in modernist abstraction. These canvases simultaneously engage various tropes of modernist painting, like the all-over composition, the grid as structure, the collapse of figure/ground distinction and the mark as gesture.