Gholamhossein Nami is one of the leading figures of modern Iranian art. He has always been an experimental artist throughout his professional life.
As a child, interest in painting and music sprouted in him. "I have been interested in drawing since the sixth grade of elementary school, and I used to draw portraits with a black "conté" pencil. When I went to high school, I started practicing with oil paints. I was in eighth grade when I drew a painting on black velvet cloth with the theme of a man searching for a lost grave with a lantern on a dark night in a cemetery. After finishing high school in 1957, he entered the Faculty of Fine Arts and studied painting under the supervision of Mahmoud Javadipour and Ali Mohammad Heydarian. Years later, he went to the United States to continue his education and received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Milwaukee. Nami founded the "Free Group" in 1974, along with artists such as Morteza Momayez, Marko Gregorian, and Faramarz Pilaram. In its four-year life, this group held several exhibitions of artworks by Iranian painters in different cities around the world and introduced Iran's modernist art; "The formation of the Azad group and its activities can be seen as a reflection of the conceptual art movement in Iran. The depiction of the artist's body on the rope-wrapped chair (Gregorian), knives hanging from the ceiling or planted in pots (Momayez), and the knotted three-dimensional white canvas (Nami) showed such a tendency." said Pakbaz.
Nami participated in the 4th Tehran Biennale in 1964. Three years later, he held his first solo exhibition at Seyhoun Gallery. Along with his studies in the United States, he exhibited his artworks individually at the Wisconsin Fine Arts Gallery. His artworks have been continuously displayed in the art centers of Iran, the US, France, Canada, etc. Several famous artworks are kept in the treasures of prestigious art centers of the world, such as the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, "International House" of Philadelphia, "Temple" the University of Philadelphia, the Art Museum of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Nami has also had a continuous activity in the field of art teaching. He has taught at the Tehran Academy of Visual Arts and has been a lecturer at Al-Zahra University of Science and Technology and the Faculty of Decorative Arts for many years.
Gholamhossein Nami's artworks, due to his experimentalism, have a wide variety of styles, but in describing the process of these artworks, we cannot talk about working periods. Because Nami has carried out his experiences similarly and has had various experiences in specific periods. As he says: "All the time I was doing 3D white abstract artworks, I was also engaged in landscape creation, colorful and rich painting, and nature creation... All the time I worked with volumes, I took inspiration from nature; But nature crystallized in my mind, changed, stylized, and became abstract and symbolic."
However, it can be said that his two-dimensional and three-dimensional white panels are the most well-known artworks of Nami. Javad Mojabi writes about this formal trend that appeared in famous artworks after 1966: "During these two decades, by using the prominence and depression of the canvas, and sometimes by creating vertical volumes such as Gereh and Ghadamgah, he employs natural bright shade of the canvas and the range of grayish colors to express his visual space. And give a stylized expression to the honest reflection of the surrounding world in the most concise way."
Gholamhossein Nami's first appearance in auctions dates back to February 2005 at Christie's auction house. Until January 2021, his artworks have appeared in domestic and foreign auctions 21 times, and 76% of his artworks have been sold in international auctions. His most expensive work until 2021 was hammered in the Tehran auction for 157,000 dollars in 2008.