For the first time exhibited in venues in Florence, the works of Iranian-American artist Y.Z. Kami

From February 17 to September 24, 2023, the Museo Novecento in Florence presents an exhibition by Y.Z. Kami (Tehran, 1956) titled Light, Gaze, Presence, which offers a selection of works exhibited for the first time in some of the symbolic places of the Tuscan capital: Museo Novecento, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo degli Innocenti and, exceptionally, in the millenary Abbey of San Miniato al Monte.

The exhibition is intended to be a journey into the pictorial universe of the Iranian-American artist, who has lived and worked in New York since the 1980s. With a selection of twenty-four works located in the city, the exhibition combines some of the main strands of Y.Z.’s artistic research. Kami in a close dialogue with the extraordinary medieval and Renaissance masterpieces housed in Florentine sites.

“With this project Florence once again confirms its vocation for the contemporary and its ability to make past and future dialogue through art, with increasingly captivating and engaging parallels,” stresses Deputy Mayor and Councillor for Culture Alessia Bettini. “For the first time Kami is exhibiting his work in an Italian institutional context, an exhibition spread across multiple locations that is a real journey of discovery of the Iranian-American artist. Our city once again proves to be a catalyst for new trends, offering the public the opportunity to discover a leading international artist who is not yet as well known as he deserves instead at the national level.”

“With great joy we welcome the beautiful work of Y.Z. Kami in the penumbra of the thousand-year-old crypt of San Miniato al Monte,” said Father Bernardo, abbot of San Miniato al Monte. “Hands outstretched toward the infinite and toward mystery, static and dynamic hands in which the oriental light of the Romanesque windows caresses fingers that stretch out in an embroidery of hope, dedication and entrustment. Prayer is a word that comes from the Latin precarius thus signaling the precariousness of those who, with humble awareness, repudiate all self-referential and presumptuous security, to deliver themselves, along the edge of the invisible, into the absolutely absolute trusting in the paradoxical gravity that the sky, despite the denial of scientific certainties, continues to exert on the dreams and desires of our heart, lifting them beyond all beyond.”

“After the great Tony Cragg exhibition, the Museo Novecento is hosting a great international artist who has accepted our invitation to engage with the city’s historical-artistic heritage,” explains Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento. “Like Jenny Saville, starring in 2021 in Florence, Y.Z. Kami puts at the center of his work the portrait, of which he is an extraordinary interpreter, seeking - like the great portrait painters of the past - to restore through painting the deep secret of the soul of his models, who are usually his friends, acquaintances and family members. The fact that many of these faces appear with their eyes closed leads us to place ourselves in silence in front of these images, inviting us to a slower contemplation, precisely in order to tune in to the spirituality enclosed in them. Therefore, the choice of places that host Kami’s paintings, from the Museo Novecento to the Abbey of San Miniato, from the Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio to the Museo degli Innocenti, is not random. Places where, today more than ever, it is necessary to find and encourage slowness and contemplation in front of the work of art.”

“Thanks to the Museo Novecento and Kami for choosing us among the Florentine cultural institutions as guests of this unique exhibition,” commented the director of the Istituto degli Innocenti Sabrina Breschi. “This consolidates a path of collaboration that has seen us participate in the city’s growing openness to contemporary art for the past two years. We will welcome in the Museum’s picture gallery two works by the Iranian-American artist, one of which, Brunelleschi (Death Mask), created especially for the occasion, and dedicated not only to one of the greatest artists of the Florentine Renaissance, but also to the man who conceived and designed the Ospedale degli Innocenti, making it an emblematic monument of a new attention to the first age of man. It is an honor for us to host them, in the certainty that the presence of these two extraordinary works will be able to bring our Museum, custodian of the history of childhood abandoned and welcomed for centuries in Brunelleschi’s building, even closer to an even wider public.”

The tour kicks off in the rooms of the Museo Novecento, where the famous portraits that made the artist known to the public are interspersed with other works from the Dome and Night Paintings series. The focus of his production for more than 30 years, the portraits are large-scale paintings that capture men and women caught in close-up, often with their eyes closed and within neutral backgrounds that leave visible only a few details besides the faces. “In painting a face, what I’m really trying to achieve is the feeling I have of it, the experience of that face going through many layers of paint and in the end always appearing a bit elusive, as if I can’t get there,” the artist states. These paintings, made from photographs taken of friends or strangers, are the result of a very slow gestation that makes these representations true apparitions, bringing to mind the ancient portraits of Fayyum by reconnecting with the portrait tradition that runs through the history of art throughout the centuries, up to the present day.

Present and absent at the same time, the figures of Y.Z. Kami are immersed in a dimension that seems to have nothing to do with our everyday life, but which refers to an elsewhere, to a place that is memory or evocation of the beyond. The luminosity rendered by the rarefied painting, as well as the experience of stillness and silence, have the ability to attract the viewer to them, arousing intense feelings, such as a sense of placid contemplation bordering on transcendence. In this sense, Y.Z. Kami is a painter of invisibility; his gaze and painting are capable of narrating humanity beyond contingency, capturing the spirituality that envelops bodies.

In the Dome series, the artist evokes archetypal images, such as mandalas, as well as the architecture and concentric shapes typical of Persian tradition and sacred architecture around the world, a metaphor for heaven and contemplation. The Night Paintings, on the other hand, are reminiscent of nocturnal, smoky and gloomy visions, elaborated from a reinterpretation of William Blake’s poetry. The dominant color is indigo, interspersed with shades of white that in their blurred appearance recall the patina of portraits, recalling something evanescent that is in danger of disappearing soon thereafter but clings tenaciously to the present and begs to be kept alive.

The exhibition continues inside the Salone dei Cinquecento - Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, where the works Untitled (2011), Untitled (Woman in Green Sweater) (2006) and Marwin (2013-2014) dialogue with Giorgio Vasari’s frescoes, creating an extraordinary contrast between the placid rarefaction of Y.Z. Kami and the vivid battle scenes that are featured on the walls of the room. The titles of the paintings, which can either refer to proper names of people or remain anonymous, reflect the constant oscillation between individuality and universality in the artist’s research. This dualism is congenital to the entire history of representation, particularly the artists’ abiding interest in the study of the human figure.

The Museo degli Innocenti houses within the picture gallery two works by Y.Z. Kami: Gold Dome II (2022) and Brunelleschi (Death Mask) (2022-2023). In particular, Filippo Brunelleschi’s Death Mask pays homage to the great master and relates on the one hand to the great portraits of the artist exhibited at the same time at the Museo Novecento and in the Salone dei Cinquecento, and on the other hand to the history of the building.

The exhibition reaches its climax inside the Abbey of San Miniato al Monte, where the work Paul’s hands (2015-17) is exceptionally welcomed. “I have been portraying hands for a long time; they represent a profound presence and meaning for me,” the artist explained. “The French theologian and philosopher Blaise Pascal said ’L’âme aime la main - the soul loves the hand.’ Very often in my paintings depicting hands, they are joined in prayer. The image of hands in prayer is a direct and clear sign of devotion that belongs to so many different religious traditions, from Christianity to Eastern religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, but not to Islam or Judaism.”

On the occasion of the Light, Gaze, Presence exhibition, the Museo Novecento is launching its first podcast series, Labyrinth900, curated by singer-songwriter Letizia Fuochi.

“The Labyrinth-a symbol of bewilderment and complicated situations-represents an allegory of the complexity of the world whose comprehensibility cannot be grasped through reason alone,” says the singer-songwriter. “According to Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the tortuosity of the path symbolically refers back to our rational inability to fully understand its own meaning, since the very nature of the labyrinth hides more complex and profound contents. Labyrinth900 is the podcast of Museo Novecento, a space laboratory place of art creativity beauty and memory.”

The first episode is dedicated to Y.Z. Kami: The Invisible Silence of Light will soon be available on MUS.E’s Spotify channel.

The exhibition is produced with the support of Gagosian.

Thanks to Hotel Savoy of Rocco Forte Hotels and Tuscan Excelsia.

Image: Installation view Y.Z. Kami. Light, Gaze, Presence, Museo Novecento, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo degli Innocenti and Abbazia di San Miniato al Monte, Florence. Photo by Serge Domingie. Courtesy of Museo Novecento.

For the first time exhibited in venues in Florence, the works of Iranian-American artist Y.Z. Kami

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