Artist Kamrose Aram discusses a new exhibition at the Art Club of Chicago – ARTnews.com

When in the midst of planning a new exhibition, Brooklyn-based artist Kamrose Aram aims to respond to the space in which his art will be displayed. This is especially true with his latest show, “Privacy, Gallery,” now on display at the Art Club of Chicago.

“Architecture is always something that enriches the work — the art of guiding architecture, architecture and working with art,” he said Wednesday night during a conversation with Janine Miliav, Executive Director of the Art Club and Principal Coordinator of the Arts Club. “The thing I’d rather not do is physically alter the architecture in a major way. I find it very wasteful, especially with short exhibitions, that you build three or four walls, and then after four weeks you tear them down.”

His first concern was the tension inherent in the venue: a private members’ club (with a rich history of presenting modernist art since 1916) containing a public exhibition space. “There is another kind of spatial conversation going on here,” he said.

Next, Aram thought about how to increase the impact of his paintings with the art club’s reflective floors, made of black terrazzo, as well as two permanent art club installations: Mies van der Rohe’s staircase and Alexander Calder’s 1942 sculpture red petalscommissioned by the organization and moved to the current space in 1997. (Title of one of Aram’s new paintings, Alexandrian, is a reference to the Persian and Arabic variant of Alexander, derived from Alexander the Great. for Aram, Alexandrian is “A salute to another Alexander the Great: Alexander Calder.”)

“When I started thinking more about how to work with architecture rather than reverse it, I started thinking about reversing complexes as a concept,” Aram said.

The exhibition includes six new panels, a painted privacy screen, a collection of six modestly sized collage panels, and two sculptural interventions in the space. The drawn elements consist of mostly abstract geometric shapes – orange, yellow, green, and blue strokes on a smudged background – that Aram has become famous for over the past several years. These works explore his interest in integrating elements associated with decorative objects and abstract painting as a means of breaking the boundaries between the two and questioning the divisions these styles of art have long faced.

Aram sees no division between the decorative arts and abstract painting at all. He said he was interested in “the difference between what is ornamental and what is ornamental: if we say perhaps something decorative can have content—whether that is conceptual, symbolic, emotional, or spiritual—and ornament is something that is superfluous in form, something that actually exists to fill the void. And I heard That these terms are used in reverse.

Paintings, and his practice in general, “set out to renegotiate the terms in which art history was written, this very central European idea of ​​what is fine art and what is small art.” His thoughts on this matter are documented in Privacy, laptopA book accompanies the presentation.

Another way that Aram responded to the arts club group was by looking at the privacy screen, The autumn (1927/28) by Nathalia Goncharova, commissioned by the Art Club in the 1920s. Aram’s work entitled Privacy screen for public architecture (2022). Both are made of multiple boards suspended together; Both are inspired by a functional household object.

And as works of art, both are meant for display rather than as functional objects. “I thought it would be interesting to make a privacy screen that doesn’t really work as a privacy screen, but as a panel,” he said.

it’s close phantom engineer (2022), located in front of one of the space windows facing the street. The installation includes a small white ceramic depicting a woman’s face atop a slender four-foot column of mahogany, steel, and concrete. The sculptural element is installed near the right side of the wall, behind a white lace curtain, against a mint green wall. On the left side, on either side of the curtain are two black Le Corbusier chairs owned by the Arts Club. (Chairs are usually located on the members-only second floor.)

It is located across from the Mies staircase and is a six-part work, Variations of a wine bottle, multicolored on a white ground (2021). Each canvas is relatively simple: in the middle there is a square showing a vertical band of color and a ceramic collage, showing the rest of the linen. While the image of ceramics relatively maintains itself, the color bar changes with each work.

Each page was drawn from six different copies of the same book documenting Iranian ceramics, and each color represents a color that can be found in the picture. Over the years, the paper on which the ceramic image is printed will continue to fade, while the oil paint will remain the same. “Oil paint is likely to solidify at this point in time, so it becomes kind of an indicator of those colors,” he said.

Color, whether in his paintings or painted directly on the walls where those works hang, is an important part of Aram’s practice. But until recently, he didn’t think much of using it for her.

“When I’m asked about color,” he said, “I give an answer that almost sounds like a cop, which is that it’s an axiom.” “But I was thinking more and more about color especially when I talked about the piece of collage. As an organizing mechanism in paintings, it happens in layers, so the turquoise color goes on, the white goes on.”

When it came to creating the many new paintings shown in the gallery, Aram started the usual way with any painting. He prepares his canvas by applying gesso with a palette knife, then begins to draw a grid with oil crayons to create different patterns.

“It goes through an erasing process so that the crayon lines are erased with solvents and rags, and then reconstructed, erased, and rebuilt until I find a suitable combination,” he said. “And then the board starts somewhere in there. Some of the boards are very fast, some are more difficult — it takes a very long time to solve.”

“There are a lot of digs going on in my drawings,” he added.