Kamrooz Aram Breaks Down the Grid

Hyperallergic profiled Iranian-born, Columbia MFA–trained artist Kamrooz Aram, noting his prominent early-2026 visibility through shows at Nature Morte in Mumbai during Mumbai Art Week, Alexander Gray Associates in Tribeca, and a substantial presentation in the 2026 Whitney Biennial. The article describes Aram’s practice as “loosening the grip of the grid,” using it to complicate the perceived divide between Western modernist abstraction and Western Asian/Islamic decorative traditions such as pottery and tilework. It highlights paintings shown in Mumbai that combine vertical grid structures with curving, organic and ornamental forms, and it connects Aram’s recasting of modernist sources to Henri Matisse’s "Bathers by a River" (1917). At the Whitney, the article cites Aram’s "Descendants (Luster on Blue Glaze)" (2025), which collages two identical book pages featuring photographs of a marbled vase to foreground modernism’s entanglement with decoration.

Read the full article at Hyperallergic