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Y.Z. Kami (Iranian, b.1956) is a New York-based Iranian artist who is mostly known as a painter, although his work also incorporates photography, installation, and sculpture. Kami studied philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley and at the Sorbonne and the Conservatoire Libre du Cinema in Paris. He later moved to New York and joined the international art circuit in the mid-1990s, exhibiting a series of solo shows at Deitch Projects between 1998 and 2001. In his 2009 exhibition Dry Land, Kami installed painted portraits of weathered faces, and photographs of decaying facades and landscapes from New York, Detroit, and Iran, in an expressive juxtaposition that exhibited the intertwined personal and political themes of his work.
Kami is perhaps best known for his large-scale paintings of humble, ordinary, and often introspective sitters, which have been described as ethereal and delicate, and even meditative—a description which dovetails with the work associated with Kami’s Endless Prayers series. This body of work includes works on paper, and sculptures, that collage and construct excerpts of script from the works of Sufi poet Rumi into mosaic-like patterns, such as those resembling interiors of architectural domes.
Kami has had exhibitions at venues such as The Museum of Modern Art, the 2005 Istanbul Biennial, the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, and the 2012 Liverpool Biennial. His work is in the collections The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Kami currently lives and works in New York, NY.
