The American Academy in Rome is pleased to present its fall exhibition, Griffa/Kamrooz Aram: Paintings, which sets the painters Giorgio Griffa (b. 1936, Turin) and Kamrooz Aram (b. 1978, Shiraz) in dialogue, will open on October 20 from 6 to 9 PM in the AAR Gallery.
The exhibition, which is curated by Ilaria Puri Purini, the Executive Director, Galileo Week 2027; Chief Curator; and Acting Heiskell Arts Director at the Academy, will run from October 23 to November 28, 2026.
At the opening, contemporary Italian poets Silvia Bre and Carmen Gallo will read a selection of poems, chosen to reflect the themes of the exhibition, from 7 to 7:30 PM in LOCATION TBD. Both award-winning poets work in an organic way, crafting vivid images and evocative atmospheres while revealing a deep engagement with the truth-making power of language.
Giorgio Griffa and Kamrooz Aram (2024 Carla Fendi Foundation Rome Prize Fellow) met in Turin in 2024, and the exhibition extends their conversation at that time about how abstract painting speaks across history, the meaning of mark-making, and the relationship between ornament and decoration, presence and loss, and margins and intimacy.
Ultimately, the exhibition presents the traditional binary between modernism and its “non-Western response” not as a fixed opposition but rather as a relationship to be perceived, examined, and celebrated.
Giorgio Griffa: The Nature of Painting Itself
Giorgio Griffa’s career spans more than sixty years, unfolding alongside the history of Italian postwar art. By the mid-1960s, Griffa’s canvases began to involve abstraction and the beginnings of a profound reflection on the nature of painting itself. His canvases are marked by simple gestures, the use of generic signs, and expansive fields of color.
Griffa describes himself as a passive recipient of the rhythmic movements that create his artwork. His canvases, often left unstretched and unframed, can be folded and carried, reflecting an approach that favors process and materiality over fixed form.
His works are held in museum collections, including those of Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Giorgio Griffa: Paths in the Forest, at the Clark Art Institute, ran from June 13 to October 12, 2026, the year of the artist’s ninetieth birthday.
Kamrooz Aram: The History of the Work's Own Making
Kamrooz Aram, the 2024 Carla Fendi Foundation Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Arts, has long been interested in disrupting what he sees as the false opposition between ornament and abstraction. Aram’s work is concerned with breaking down the categories that separate Western and non-Western art, drawing on motifs from Islamic artistic traditions, such as the arabesque, while examining how these motifs have been subordinated within the Western canon.
Aram’s compositions begin with a grid, which he then wipes away, leaving within the finished painting the history of its own making. His practice combines painting, sculpture, collage, and exhibition design, highlighting the interdependence between objects and their display and revealing the essential role that architecture and design play in the interpretation of artworks.
His work is in the collections of museums and institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, M+ Museum in Hong Kong, and the Sharjah Art Foundation in Sharjah, UAE. In addition to receiving the 2024 Carla Fendi Rome Prize from the Academy, he received a Trellis Art Fund “Stepping Stone Grant” as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025.