Incollect Magazine Issue 7

Incollect Magazine 87 Y. Z. Kami Leila Heller Gallery Endless Prayers XVII (2009) is a painting made of mixed media by Iranian-born artist Y. Z. Kami. He is known for his large-scale portrait paintings, usually in oil paint, based on photographs from his own life, He has also produced several important and parallel series of meditative abstract artworks such as the popular “The Domes” series which depicts tessellated voids of color incorporating references to sacred architecture found in the Iranian city of Isfahan, capital of the Persian Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as this painting, from the “Endless Prayers” series in which “Persian, Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit poems, prayers and verses have been cut into rectangular fragments and pasted into mandala formations, their spiraling patterns echoing the repetitive nature of worship,” says Leila Heller, the gallery owner. This is a deeply meditative painting designed to blur the boundaries of the earthly and the divine. Y. Z. Kami (b. 1956) Endless Prayers XVII, 2009 Mixed media on paper 42 x 30 inches Leila Heller Gallery, New York, New York