Perry Rubenstein Gallery is pleased to announce Of Flame and Splendour, Kamrooz Aram’s debut solo-exhibition with the gallery. Aram will exhibit new paintings and drawings created over the past year.

While the iconography and scale of his work is undoubtedly recognizable as his own, this exhibition marks a distinct shift in Aram’s approach. Aram explores such diverse themes as new age mysticism, the glorification of violence, and the idealization of revolutionary, religious and nationalist ideologies, most significantly through an investigation of contemporary Orientalism. The notion of Orientalism, as famously popularized by the late theorist Edward Said, is summarized as a general subjugation of the East as described and portrayed by the West through both high and low culture.

Aram’s paintings explore iconography used in the Islamic and the Western worlds, questioning convenient definitions and categorizations. His compositions are populated with scrolling foliage referencing Persian miniatures and carpet patterns, angels from Shiite religious posters and Giotto paintings, as well as the pictorial language of popular culture. Images and symbols are introduced and re-contextualized so that their very signifier changes; the work becomes an expansion and abstraction of the iconography he uses.

Aram is working within a familiar lexicon but the process of painting pushes the imagery out of the realm of objectivity. Aram sees this step toward abstraction as not necessarily in opposition to representation, rather as an abstraction of ideas. The iconography in these paintings relates sometimes directly and sometimes quite obliquely to the iconography of the world in which we live. By creating a parallel universe in which the artist investigates these themes, he is able to open the work to the viewer for further exploration.

Also on view are drawings from the series Mystical Visions and Cosmic Vibrations (begun in 2004), which takes its title from a line in Allen Ginsberg’s America. Ginsberg and many poets and artists of his time had a sincere, nevertheless Orientalist fascination with Eastern cultures and religions. In the most recent drawings from this series, Aram often portrays bearded men in turbans: the Mullah (religious scholar) or the Sufi mystic. In the West, these figures are commonly identified as symbols of religious extremism and radical politics. However, like Ginsberg and his peers, some idealize these figures as a source of spiritual wealth. In both his paintings and drawings, Aram engages with the complexity of these relationships and challenges the convenient divisions of East versus West.

Kamrooz Aram was born in Shiraz, Iran. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Past group exhibitions include: the Busan Biennale (2006) and the Orlando Museum of Art (2007). He has had solo exhibitions, among others, at the Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA (2006), the Wilkinson Gallery in London, UK, and Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery in New York, NY (2007). In 2008 his work was included in Empire and Its Discontents at the Tufts University Art Gallery in Medford, MA and in Wall Rockets: Contemporary Artists and Ed Ruscha, curated by Lisa Dennison at The Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY.