Kamrooz Aram is featured in a two-person exhibition Griffa/Aram at the American Academy in Rome, on view from October 23–November 28, 2026.
The American Academy in Rome's press release follows:
The American Academy in Rome is pleased to present Giorgio Griffa/Kamrooz Aram:
Paintings, an exhibition that sets two painters in dialogue Giorgio Griffa (b. 1936, Turin) and Kamrooz Aram (b. 1978, Shiraz). On view from October 20th to November 28th and curated by Ilaria Puri Purini, the show examines how abstract painting speaks across time. The exhibition follows Griffa’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, at the Clark Art Institute, and comes in the year of his ninetieth birthday.
The two artists met in Turin in 2024, and the exhibition extends the conversation they began there. Their exchange turns on cultural traditions, the limits of the canon, and painting as a means of measuring time while holding on to what is fleeting. It touches on ornament and decoration, presence and loss, margin and intimacy. The exhibition presents the traditional binary between modernism and its “non-Western response” not as a fixed opposition but as a relationship to be perceived, examined and celebrated.
Griffa’s career spans more than sixty years and has unfolded alongside the history of Italian post-war art. His abstract canvases are marked by elementary gestures, generic signs, and expansive fields of color. Working within the conventions of Western modernist painting, Griffa describes himself as a passive recipient of the rhythmic movements that create the work. His canvases are often left unstretched and unframed, and can be folded and carried, an approach that favors process and materiality over fixed form.
Aram’s practice is defined by the act of painting itself and questions notions of endurance and persistence. Concerned with the categories that separate Western and non-Western art, he draws on motifs from Islamic artistic traditions, including the arabesque, while examining how these motifs have been subordinated within the Western art historical canon. Each composition begins with a grid that he then wipes away, leaving the finished painting to carry the history of its own making. Aram was the 2024 Carla Fendi Foundation Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Arts at the
American Academy in Rome.
“As a painter, one of the most important things is to be able to respect that material intelligence and not impose our own will over it.” Giorgio Griffa
"In my paintings there are a lot of gaps and open spaces where one can see the history of painting, but one sees it all on one surface, so it's uncertain what happened since there is kind of flattening of time." Kamrooz Aram
