Nature Morte is pleased to present Fragment and Division, an exhibition of nine new paintings by Kamrooz Aram, marking the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Aram continues his exploration of painting as a site where multiple art-historical lineages converge. The motifs of pattern, their original contexts and provenances, and architectural delineation shift from embellishment into forms that excavate their own inheritances. Each composition emerges through a process of revision: the surface becomes a palimpsest in which traces of earlier decisions remain visible, indexing time, labor, and the instability of visual memory.

In these paintings, structure becomes both an anchor and an unruly force. Paint applied in repetitive foundations, is repeatedly unsettled and wiped back into ghostly traces, overlaid with new marks, and then fractured again. What emerges is a surface that refuses stability: fragments of motifs push forward while others recede into a veiled substrate, generating a rhythm of appearance and disappearance. This dialogue between control and dissolution reveals the works as temporal objects, bearing the scars and residues of their own formation.

This interplay reflects Aram’s ongoing critique of the hierarchies that have historically relegated ornament to the realm of the “decorative,” separating it from the category of Fine Art. His work proposes instead that ornament is a central and contested site within modernism. Fragment and Division presents Aram’s most distilled engagement with fragmentation as both a visual strategy and conceptual framework. Through acts of division, interruption, and recomposition, the exhibition embodies a dynamic conversation between past and present, gesture and geometry, memory and erasure, content and context.

About the Artist

Kamrooz Aram’s work is rooted in the history and practice of painting, which he expands to include collage, photography, sculptural works and exhibition design. His work engages the complicated relationship between Western Modernism and non-western ornamental art, a dialogue he believes has been consciously avoided.

Kamrooz Aram (born in 1978, Shiraz, Iran) received his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001 and MFA from Columbia University in 2003. He now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Recent solo exhibitions include: “Domestic Compositions” and “Arabesque,” Green Art Gallery, Dubai (2025 and 2019); “Elusive Ornament,” Peter Blum Gallery, NY (2022); “An Object, A Gesture, A Décor”, FLAG Art Foundation, NY (2018); “FOCUS: Kamrooz Aram,” The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX, USA (2018); “Ancient Blue Ornament,” Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA, USA (2018); “Ornament for Indifferent Architecture,” Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Belgium (2017).

Recent group exhibitions include: “RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting,” PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal, Canada (2020); “Some Mysterious Process: 50 Years of Collecting International Art,” Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2020); “Desorientalismos,” Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain (2020); “Fragile Frontiers: Visions on Iran’s in/visible borders,” YARAT Centre, Baku, Azerbaijan (2019); “Gateway: Fragments, Yesterday and Today,” Gallery S, Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, UAE (2019); “The Crime of Adolf Loos,” Axel Vervoodt, Belgium (2019); “Jameel Prize 5,” The Porter Gallery, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK (2018); “Le Musée Imaginaire,” Pavillion Trab, Jaou Tunis, Tunisia (2018); “Kamrooz Aram, Anwar Jalal Shemza,” Hales Gallery, NY, USA (2018).