Kamrooz Aram, Anwar Jalal Shemza

Hales Project Room

January 24—February 25, 2018

Opening Night: January 28, 2018

5—7 PM

64 Delancey Street

New York NY 10002

Hales Gallery’s Project Room in New York will be showing, “Kamrooz Aram, Anwar Jalal Shemza”, an exhibition which coincides with Aram’s solo exhibitions at Atlanta Contemporary (open January 2018) and The Modern Fort Worth (open March 2018). In Spring 2018, Hales Gallery London will hold a solo exhibition of works by Anwar Jalal Shemza.

The exhibition pulls into dialogue the work of two artists, Aram (b. Iran, 1978) and Shemza (b. India, 1928 – 1985), concerned with the relationship between ornamental art and modernist abstractions. In the works selected for this exhibition, form and process both contribute to the investigation of the line drawn between “art” and “ornament.” And by juxtaposing two generations of artists, the pieces feed into rich investigations of the historical patterns of artistic development, erasure, and abstraction.

Shemza’s diasporic perspective, as an artist with a deeply studied understanding both of Islamic aesthetic principles and the tradition of geometric abstraction in the West, allowed him to explore modernism through a uniquely doubled prism. In his work from the late 1950s and early 1960s, he fused a formalist vocabulary of simple shapes and colors in the tradition of Mondrian or Klee with textiles and prints covered with sinuous lines recalling the calligraphic strokes of the Arabic alphabet or the repeated patterns adorning carpets and fabrics. In direct parallel, Kamrooz Aram, born in Shiraz and having received an MFA from Columbia University, has developed an artistic practice emerging from both Western and non-Western motifs and materials.

When brought together, Shemza’s prints and Aram’s paintings attest to the repeated patterns of construction and destruction that have shaped the narrative of art history. They invite us to question the status of the ornament and to meditate on the acts of creation that bring them about.

Find more info about this show via Hales Gallery and see more of Aram’s work here.