Blurring the boundary between traditional non-Western art and Western Modernism, Iranian-American artist Kamrooz Aram mixes representational objects and imagery with abstraction, ornamentation and exhibition design to create profound paintings, collages, drawings and installations, many of which reference traditional Persian visual culture to comment on the institutional display of Islamic art objects. Aram began to consider the gallery space as an architectural whole with such recent exhibitions as “Recollections for a Room” at Dubai’s Green Art Gallery in 2016–17; “Ornament for Indifferent Architecture” at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium in 2017; and “Ancient Blue Ornament” at the Atlanta Contemporary in Atlanta, Georgia in January this year. Featuring painted walls, decorative canvases, graphic collages and sculptural tableaux, these exhibitions embraced the design concept of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or a synthesis of the arts.
These experimental presentations led directly to his striking show at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, which is arguably one of his best exhibitions to date. Occupying three galleries of Tadao Ando’s dynamically designed museum, which opened in 2002, the show combines elements of Russian Suprematist paintings, Persian rugs and Islamic artifacts with traditional methods of museum presentation. Adding even more facets to this fusion, the artist employs materials that reference Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa’s sophisticated structural designs, while creating poetic assemblages that evoke the pioneering Romanian modernist Constantin Brâncuși’s heterogeneous forms.
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