CANVAS

Arabesque is Kamrooz Aram's third solo exhibition at Dubai's Green Art Gallery where, ever-haunted by the spectre of the ornament and its conceptual implications in Modernist discourse and art history, the Brooklyn-based artist takes the arabesque motif and breaks it down. Framed within the logic of the grid only to transcend it, Aram's latest body of work recalibrates the act of painting.

Kamrooz Aram has a knack for turning binaries to dualities. In his paintings and museological displays, he finds points of convergence between historical divisions: East and West, ornament and abstraction, gesture and grid, figure and ground. Mastering seemingly opposed visual languages with floral geometries and gestural patterns, he is well-known for these acts and counter-acts.