Kamrooz Aram has built his practice around dismantling false divisions in art. His work challenges the constructed boundary between the “fine” arts of painting and sculpture and the so-called “decorative” or “minor” arts of ceramics, metalwork, and other three-dimensional objects. In doing so, he also questions the Eurocentric values that have long shaped the writing of art history.

The title of Aram’s Arabesque series refers to the scrolling vegetal designs, known in Arabic as islimi, that animate the surfaces of many works of Islamic art. For generations, art historians dismissed such forms as ornamental and largely devoid of conceptual meaning. Aram reworks and expands these motifs to create abstract fields of colour and form in his paintings. He also creates installations that place historical Islamic ceramics in front of his canvases, a configuration that relegates the paintings to the spatial and conceptual “background.” Through these juxtapositions, Aram invites viewers to reflect on how museum displays reinforce hierarchies that value modernist abstraction over ornament.

For this co-curated gallery intervention, the Aga Khan Museum has invited Aram — in a first for the artist — to select a ceramic from the Collection to install with a painting from his Arabesque series. The painting is executed in pigment made from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone that has been mined since antiquity in the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan. Known as ultramarine, it was among the most prized and expensive pigments used in medieval and Renaissance Europe.

Lapis held equal prestige in the Islamic world: in the late thirteenth century, Iranian ceramics artists innovated a new kind of luxury ware called lajvardina, which used all-over cobalt glaze to make vessels appear as though they were carved from solid lapis. Aram has selected a celebrated lajvardina bottle in the Museum’s Collection to pair with his painting.