The American Academy in Rome presents Chance Encounters: Kamrooz Aram and Giorgio Griffa, an exhibition that creates a dialogue between two painters whose work illustrates how abstract painting reverberates across time and space. The painters met in 2024 in Turin, and this exhibition extends a conversation they began about the place and purpose of cultural tradition, painting as a measure of time and rhythm, and how gesture is traced and captured. The exhibition addresses this ongoing dialogue on abstraction, reflecting on different approaches to ornament and decoration, presence and loss, margins and intimacy.

For the opening, contemporary Italian poets Silvia Bre and Carmen Gallo will read a selection of poems chosen to reflect the themes of the exhibition. Both authors work with language in an organic way, crafting vivid images and evocative atmospheres while revealing a deep engagement with the truth-making power of language.

The exhibition is in collaboration with the Fondazione Giorgio Griffa, the Clark Art Institute of Art, Lorcan O'Neill Gallery, and Alexander Grey Associates. This project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council programme (2025).

Giorgio Griffa was born in Turin in 1936 and began painting as a child. By the mid-1960s, his canvases already displayed the first elements of abstraction and a profound reflection on the nature of painting itself. In 1967–68, with the "Segni primari" (Primary Signs) series, he developed his distinctive working method: painting on paper or unstretched, unprimed canvases laid directly on the floor, using marks and lines that, in his words, "could belong to anyone's hand." From the outset, Griffa emerged as a leading figure in the artistic discourse that grew out of Informal Art, alongside the rise of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. During this period, he forged his own singular artistic path working alongside friends in the Arte Povera movement, with whom he shared a deep respect for and interest in the intelligence of materials.

After more than fifty years of artistic practice and thirteen painting cycles, Griffa's work remains distinctive and independent of any single artistic movement. Held in museum and private collections around the world, from the Tate Modern to the Centre Pompidou, his paintings are instantly recognizable for their characteristic marks and colors, a visual language that carries remarkable continuity, coherence, vitality, and poetry from one work to the next.

Kamrooz Aram (2024 Fellow) was born in Shiraz, Iran and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work disrupts the false opposition between ornament and abstraction, and challenges ornament's relegation to discourses of criminality and excess. In his wide-ranging exhibitions, combining painting, sculpture, collage and exhibition design, he stages an encounter between the Euro-American avant-garde and non-western forms of abstraction, interrogating the boundaries between art, artifact, and modes of display.

Recent exhibitions include Peter Blum Gallery (New York); The Arts Club of Chicago; Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture (Hasselt, Belgium); Nature Morte Gallery (New Delhi, India); FLAG Art Foundation (New York); Green Art Gallery (Dubai, UAE); The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; The Atlanta Contemporary; Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Deurle, Belgium).

Silvia Bre is a poet and translator. She has published I riposi (Rotundo), Sempre perdendosi (nottetempo), and, with Einaudi, the poetry collections Le barricate misteriose, Marmo, La fine di quest’arte, and most recently Le campane. In 2022, she published the essay Mistero with Vallecchi. Her translations include works by Louise Labé, Claudia Rankine, Vita Sackville-West, and Margaret Atwood, as well as Emily Dickinson’s Centroquattro poesie, Uno zero più ampio, and Questa parola fidata, published by Einaudi. More recently, she translated Robert Frost’s Fuoco e ghiaccio for Adelphi. Einaudi’s Tascabili series has also published her translation of an extensive collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems. 

Carmen Gallo is a poet and translator. Her recent poetry books include Tecniche di nascondimento per adulti (Italo Svevo, 2024), Stanze per una fuga (La Vita Felice, 2025), and Procne Machine (Einaudi, 2026), which was named a finalist for the 2026 Strega Prize. Her collection Le fuggitive (Aragno, 2020) was awarded the Premio Napoli. She has written on the metaphysical poetry of John Donne and translated works by William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Caryl Churchill, Hannah Sullivan, and others. She teaches English literature at Sapienza University of Rome.