Kamrooz Aram: The Turquoise Agenda: WINDOW, 91 Walker Street New York, NY (corner of Walker and Lafayette Street)
Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to present The Turquoise Agenda, New York-based artist Kamrooz Aram’s solo exhibition at WINDOW.
The exhibition carefully considers the storefront space’s function as display. Drawing on his interest in museum design, the artist approaches the window as a public vitrine. Combining painting, sculpture and collage, he creates an interdependence between object, display and architecture, demonstrating the significance of design in affecting the interpretation of art.
Aram’s work disrupts the false opposition between ornament and abstraction, renegotiating art historical hierarchies that have relegated ornamental forms to the category of minor arts. While the artist’s practice is rooted in a commitment to painting, his exhibitions employ a variety of approaches and media, often unified by wall-painting as exhibition design.
Kamrooz Aram’s work evokes the passage of time; the evolution, persistence and survival of forms. His paintings–having undergone a process that includes drawing, erasure, redrawing, scraping down and layering paint–reveal the history of their own making. Likewise, his collages and sculptural works demonstrate how layers of time might present themselves physically in objects and images.
Kamrooz Aram was born in Shiraz, Iran, in 1978, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: Elusive Ornament, Peter Blum Gallery, New York; Privacy, an Exhibition, The Arts Club of Chicago; Lives of Forms, Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, Hasselt, Belgium; The New Arabesque, Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi, India; An Object, A Gesture, A Décor, FLAG Art Foundation, New York; In Memory of the Arabesque, Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE; Ornament for Extraordinary Architecture, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Ancient Blue Ornament, The Atlanta Contemporary; and Ornament for Indifferent Architecture, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium. Aram was the recipient of a 2024 Rome Prize Fellowship and is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow.
