The presentation brings together two bodies of work by the artist: a survey of Dome paintings made from 2011 to the present, and a group of new Messenger paintings. The exhibition marks a meaningful return to the West Coast for Kami—he spent his early years in Northern California after moving to the United States from Tehran in 1973, and Southern California has played host to a number of his institutional presentations, including a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art nearly a decade ago.

The Dome paintings interpret architectural structures as painted form, their tessellated rectangles and squares arrayed in concentric rings of white, blue, black, or gold. In some works, Kami additionally creates radiant mosaiclike squares that converge at the compositions’ centers. Abstracting the experience of gazing up into luminous hemispheres, these paintings evoke the domes of temples, churches, and mosques—technical triumphs of construction that span enormous light-filled spaces to signify the heavens.
Eliminating spatial perspective, the Dome paintings function as mandalas, meditative designs that aspire to infinity. Additionally, their palettes correspond to the four stages of material and symbolic transmutation of elements in the tradition of alchemy. These works emerged from Kami’s consideration of sacred architecture in Untitled (Diptych) (1996), which was featured in the exhibition Architecture as Metaphor at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1997. This pair of large-scale photographic prints mounted on canvas juxtaposes two Persian domes to form a spatial vortex. Kami developed the motif of concentric circles further with Rumi, The Book of Shams E Tabrizi (In Memory of Mahin Tajadod) (2005), a sculpture of soapstone blocks imprinted with verses by the Persian poet Rumi, and with his series of Endless Prayer collages and paintings (initiated in 2005).
Accompanying the Dome works are three new paintings from the Messenger series, a body of work Kami first began in 2022, of which one entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2023. Inspired by a photograph he took while traveling in India, the series incorporates the motif of a single figure seen from behind. Painted in a soft-focus style related to the artist’s portraits, the anonymous individual is caught mid-stride seemingly at a crossroads. In the three works on view here, Kami positions the figures either before the lush greens of forest-covered hills or moving toward a metropolis with skyscrapers that rise like a mirage in the distance. These paintings present a contrast between humanity, nature, and architecture, and perhaps between timelessness and the materiality of the secular world.