Kamrooz Aram works on a painting until it feels ready to exist on its own. He layers gesso, draws, wipes, and returns, letting the lines settle slowly. The paintings now on view at Alexander Gray Associates span six years of patient attention, each surface holding the memory of its making. In the following conversation, Aram talks about where the paintings begin and what it means to work against modernism’s long-standing suspicion of the decorative, not by dismantling it through argument, but by simply making it feel beside the point.
PLUS MAGAZINE: I want to start somewhere before the work we’re here to talk about, before painting was even part of the picture. Before painting became part of your life, what were you drawn to, and how did that change?
KAMROOZ ARAM: Before I started painting, I had other creative outlets like writing and music. As an ESL student in the United States, I became very proficient in English, and writing came naturally to me. I sometimes wonder if that’s connected to learning the language at eight years old, almost like learning to play a musical instrument at a young age. I started playing drums when I was about 12, and that became my identity throughout my teenage years. My dream was to be a musician. I recently read Patti Smith’s memoir, in which she talks about recognizing the difference between a dream and a calling. This distinction was striking to me. Music was a dream for me, but I guess painting turned out to be the calling.
I made my first painting quite randomly when I was around 17. I bought a set of acrylic paints and painted on paper. I immediately connected with the material, dragging one color over another and finding a depth in that layering. Something in that process felt very emotional to me. I took it to my high school art teacher, and he looked at it for a while without saying anything. Then he said gently, ‘We have to get you painting.’ He made the space for me, coached me, and encouraged me until I became obsessed with it. To find something you do well and that people recognize, at that age, at that particularly difficult time of becoming, is invaluable.
P: That experience of finding something that needed time to develop seems to have stayed with you. Seeing the exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates, and knowing these paintings span six years without any rush, you can feel that patience in them. What was it like to finally show them?
KA: I made these particular paintings intermittently between 2020 and 2026, and each painting was given ample time to develop: to be left alone, returned to, and reworked. They are not a series — and there’s no seriality, even though they have strong relationships to one another. They are autonomous, individual paintings installed in the gallery without wall-painting or exhibition design; something I haven’t done in a while.
My studio has always been very private. I like to allow the work to become itself without pressure. Once I think I’ve arrived at some kind of resolution, I need to let it sit, to be sure it doesn’t require anything else from me. Two weeks is typically the right amount of time for me to sit with a painting and let it breathe. With these paintings, however, I allowed them much longer than that.
I’d been holding these paintings back over the past few years, waiting for the right moment. When I proposed this to Alexander Gray and the gallery team, they were immediately enthusiastic. And coincidentally, it landed at the same time as the Biennial, allowing my two different approaches to exhibition-making to be on view at the same time in my home city.
P: Was the timing something you felt clearly, or did it take longer to arrive at than you expected?
KA: I felt ready a year or two before the exhibition, but the timing worked out perfectly because I completed two paintings at the beginning of 2026, which are included in the show, and I feel are critical to the exhibition.
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Read full interview at plusmagazine.net.
