Kamrooz Aram: Infrequencies

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Infrequencies, Kamrooz Aram’s (b. 1978, Shiraz, Iran; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) first exhibition with the Gallery. The show coincides with the artist’s participation in the 2026 Whitney Biennial, which opens this March. Together, these two presentations mark a significant moment in Aram’s ongoing engagement with abstraction and ornament as he works within—and against—the inherited art-historical frameworks that have shaped painting’s histories and hierarchies

Infrequencies brings together a focused group of paintings from the last six years, works Aram makes only intermittently. These canvases depart from the grid-based frameworks that have long anchored his practice in favor of more gestural, open modes of mark-making. Rather than signaling a new direction, the paintings operate as a parallel register within the artist’s broader inquiry.

While these works move away from the visible grid, they remain shaped by it. In these paintings, the grid no longer serves as a governing framework; instead, it emerges as an internalized structure sustained by memory. Against this inherited order, arcing shapes and continuous lines swirl, recalling ornamental and calligraphic traditions without resolving into pattern. Curvilinear passages interrupt the grid’s logic even as they remain responsive to it, producing a sustained tension between control and flow, structure and embellishment.

Across Aram’s canvases, this push and pull becomes the engine of the work: modernist abstraction is neither outright rejected nor affirmed, but re-presented through gestures that allow variation, drift, and asymmetry to assert themselves. Writing on Aram’s oeuvre, art historian Lauren O’Neill-Butler connects his approach to histories of decorative practices that have been sidelined within dominant Western narratives of abstraction. She observes that Aram’s compositions “… foreground the body of work as much as the work of the body,” emphasizing how form takes shape through duration, repetition, and lived engagement.

In Infrequencies, this approach unfolds sinuously across each painting’s surface. The gestural passages of Exuberant Flâneuse (2020) and Angelico (2024–25) embrace faint traces of prior order; their forms remain attuned to the compositional logic they interrupt. Curves advance and retreat as thin washes of oil build into sustained crescendos of layered impasto. Earlier passages linger beneath the surface, revealing each composition’s evolution and positioning the paintings as sites of active negotiation that yield visual pleasure. In doing so, Aram’s paintings gather looking, revising, and making into a single moment of encounter, where time is felt as density rather than sequence.

Aram’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Kamrooz Aram: Privacy, An Exhibition, The Arts Club of Chicago, IL (2022); Lives of Forms: Kamrooz Aram and Iman Issa, Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture, Hasselt, Belgium (2021); FOCUS: Kamrooz Aram, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX (2018); Kamrooz Aram: Ancient Blue Ornament, Atlanta Contemporary, GA (2018); and Kamrooz Aram: Ornament for Indifferent Architecture, Museum Dhondt Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium (2017). His work has been featured in significant group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial 2026, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2026); Paraventi: Folding Screens from the 17th to 21st Centuries, Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2023-2024); and Desorientalismos, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain (2020). Aram’s work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; M+ Museum, Hong Kong, China; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Cincinnati Art Museum, OH; Portland Museum of Art, ME; and Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates, among others. He is the recipient of multiple prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2025); the Carla Fendi Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2024); and the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2014). Kamrooz Aram is also represented by Green Art Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.