Statement:

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.