Canvas

Kamrooz Aram’s studio is located in a refurbished factory building on Varick Street in Bushwick, an industrial Brooklyn neighbourhood that has seen an influx of young artists in recent years. The Iranian artist’s workspace is littered with the many tools of his craft: stretched and primed canvases of various sizes, piles of tubes of paint, pastels, oil sticks and grease pencils, tins filled with brushes and palette knives, stacks of makeshift palettes encrusted with smears of pigment, jugs of thinner and paint-stained rags.

Though he is first and foremost an oil painter, Aram does regularly dabble in other media and a small selection of his ink on paper drawings and collages also grace the studio’s walls. While his finished canvases are neatly stored away on shelves in the back corner, those currently in process gingerly lean against the walls, each perched on a couple of blocks of wood. Aram often works on more than one canvas at a time and as we talk, he cycles through some of what he has been working on for the past year – a series of 27 canvases titled Palimpsests – a selection of which will be shown at his solo exhibition at Dubai’s Green Art Gallery in March alongside a newly published monograph.