Kamrooz Aram
June 16, 2026

Born in 1978 in Shiraz, Iran, Kamrooz Aram emigrated to the United States when he was eight years old. As a young person, he became an enthusiastic drummer, and music has continued to be an important part of his life. It is no surprise, then, that he brings an exceptional mix to the Selection Committee. With music spanning Iranian, Kurdish, Algerian-French, and iconic American pieces, Aram shares the history and context of the songs along with eloquent exegeses on their connection to his work.

In his practice, Aram is invested in narratives of form that have been overlooked, dismissed, or intentionally written out of art history. Working against modernist ideas about abstraction as “pure form,” Aram engages in the historical and political content of painting as well as of the decorative arts.

His sculptural pieces—like “Requiem for Perpetual Defeat”, currently on view in the Whitney Biennial—employ modes of museological display to incorporate artifacts of varying quality without offering any didactic information. Flickering between nostalgia, reverence, and suspicion, the works invite viewers to question how they assign value and what it means for objects to be institutionally recontextualized.

We talk about the first screen Aram ever made—for his 2022 exhibition “Privacy” at the Arts Club of Chicago—and how screens are objects that sit squarely in between painting and the decorative arts. They are also dividers between public and private spaces. Inspired by the Club itself, both a member’s-only society and a public art space, Aram’s screen alludes to curious points of contact between the gendered sections of the traditional Iranian home and those in the domestic spaces of modernist architects like “Ornament and Crime” author Adolf Loos. These conflicting accords infuse Aram’s work with an edgy vitality.

Kamrooz Aram’s work vibrates with an elegant tension between shape, color, abstraction, allusion, and various art histories. Our discussion and the music that he brings are a genuine delight!

Complete playlist below; tracks in yellow were cut for time.

1. Lay My Love, Brian Eno & John Cale, 1990
   
2. Ho Chérie Chérie, Rachid Taha, 2000
   
3. Komel Kah, Ali Akbar Moradi, 2001
   
4. Sepideh Dam, Mahasti, 1990
   
5. Sepideh Dam, Javad Yassari, 1988
   
6. Bordi Az Yadam, Viguen, Delkash, 2004
   
7. Meditations For Moses, Charles Mingus, 1963
   
8. 17 Days - Piano & A Microphone 1983 Version, Prince, 2018
   
9. Purple Rain - Piano & A Microphone 1983 Version, Prince, 2018
   
10. A Case of You - Piano & A Microphone 1983 Version, Prince, 2018
    
11. Love Me Or Leave Me, Nina Simone, 1966
12. The Plum Blossom - Remastered 2023, Yusef Lateef, 2024
    
13. Heleh Mali, Toofan, 1991
    
14. Gourara, Hamid Baroudi, 2004
15. America, Allen Ginsberg, 1998
16. If 6 Was 9, Jimi Hendrix, 1967
17. Dear Mr. Man, Prince, 2004
18. Improvised Pishdaramad, M.R.Lotfi, Mohammad-Reza Shajarian, 1997
    
19. Daramad, M.R.Lotfi, Mohammad-Reza Shajarian, 1997
    
20. Hejaz, M.R.Lotfi, Mohammad-Reza Shajarian, 1997

Kamrooz Aram (b. 1978) has built his practice on dismantling the divide between ornament and fine art, renegotiating the art historical hierarchies that privilege Western forms of abstraction above others. His paintings and sculptures do not simply cross categories; they probe the structures that enforce them. Born in Shiraz, Iran, Aram emigrated to the United States in the 1980s, where he found himself forced to come to terms with a multitude of identities imposed upon him. These experiences left a lasting mark. Categories, he discovered, do not merely describe identity—they invent it. This recognition drives his work, which asserts that non-Western ornamental traditions carry the same intellectual weight and conceptual rigor Western art history has long reserved for itself.

Aram’s paintings are acts of translation. Intricate geometries slip into fields of color, while brushstrokes accumulate in thin layers, revealing glimpses of what lies beneath. Aram speaks of pursuing contemporary art’s “taboo subjects” like emotion and spiritual presence, and in his work, they appear not as sentiment, but as structure. Calligraphic forms reverberate against the cool authority of Minimalist grids; floral arabesque patterns breathe new life into Color Field painting. These juxtapositions are not acts of fusion, so much as acts of recognition, acknowledging what has always been visible.

Aram’s influences are as diverse as his artistic strategies. Henri Matisse’s embrace of pattern, Ellsworth Kelly’s geometric clarity, and Cy Twombly’s gestural abandon all resonate in his practice. Most revealing is Le Corbusier—modernism’s supposed ascetic—whose architecture, despite its rhetoric of purity, cannot entirely suppress its embrace of ornament. For Aram, this contradiction lays bare how words like “decorative” are never neutral; they are instruments of hierarchy.

Aram’s sculptures extend this critique into three dimensions, arranging ceramic objects on painted plinths that echo museum displays. These installations engage with institutions from within, showing how context confers the status of “art” and revealing the fragile systems behind such designations. As Aram explains, “I hope to renegotiate the terms in which art history has been written—the Eurocentric hierarchy that places certain types of painting in the category of fine art while others are relegated to the minor arts.”

At the center of Aram’s practice lies a paradox he captures with poetic clarity in his writing: “It occurs to me that I am Arabesque. It occurs to me that there is no such thing as the Arabesque.” His work inhabits the charged space between being and non-being, tradition and invention, visibility and erasure. Rather than resolving these contradictions, Aram leaves them; it is in their friction—in the failure of old certainties—that new ways of seeing begin to emerge.

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 at Z33 Alexander Gray Associates 384 Broadway New York NY 10013 United States Tel: +1 212 399 2636 www.alexandergray.com 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 Whitney Biennial 2026, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (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; 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 Trellis Art Fund Stepping Stone Grant (2025); the Guggenheim Fellowship (2025); the Carla Fendi Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (2024); and the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2014). He is also represented by Green Art Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Aram lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.