Alexander Gray Associates presents a focused dialogue between Kamrooz Aram, Bethany Collins, and Ronny Quevedo at Frieze NYC
Installation view: Alexander Gray Associates, Frieze New York, 2026
Alexander Gray Associates presents a focused dialogue between Kamrooz Aram, Bethany Collins, and Ronny Quevedo, three artists whose practices engage the unstable terrain of cultural memory—how it is constructed, obscured, and rearticulated through material, gesture, and form. Working across painting, works on paper, and sculpture, each artist approaches abstraction not as a neutral language, but as a site where histories surface, fragment, and recombine.
Kamrooz Aram Untitled (Arabesque Composition), 2026 Oil, oil crayon, and pencil on linen 60 1/8 x 46 1/8 in (152.7 x 117.2 cm) Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York; Green Art Gallery, Dubai © 2026 Kamrooz Aram
Kamrooz Aram’s Untitled (Anticipated Arabesque) (2025) anchors the presentation, developing a vocabulary of ornament and gesture that challenges the long-standing hierarchies of Western art history. Aram, who is currently featured in the Whitney Biennial, continues his sustained inquiry into the marginalization of decorative traditions, revealing their conceptual and structural connections to modernist abstraction. Curved forms move across the surface in shifting relationships, creating a sense of constant emergence rather than fixed composition. Here, ornament becomes both the subject and method—an index of movement and translation continuously reconfigured across the surface.
Ronny Quevedo's birdsong (2025) extends this conversation through a layered engagement with migration, pattern, and indigenous knowledge. Drawing on ancient feathered Peruvian textiles in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the work channels histories of material intelligence and transmission that predate and exceed Western frameworks of abstraction. Composed of ink, metal leaf, and pattern paper on muslin, birdsong evokes histories of cultural memory and displacement, holding meaning in suspension—unsettled and in motion.
Bethany Collins The drooping flowers bloom, 2026 Wax pastel and acrylic on paper 40 5/8 x 60 1/8 in (103.2 x 152.7 cm) 44 1/2 x 64 x 1 3/4 in framed (113 x 162.6 x 4.4 cm framed) Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York; PATRON Gallery, Chicago © 2026 Bethany Collins
Bethany Collins's works operate in a parallel register, where language and material bear the weight of historical violence and erasure. The drooping flowers bloom(2026) and My destiny is in your hands(2025–26) extend her ongoing investigations into text, memory, and the afterlives of American history. Incorporating granite from a decommissioned Stonewall Jackson monument, Collins's sculptural work resonates with her installation Love is Dangerous, recently featured in Monuments at MOCA Geffen, where stone becomes both witness and fragment—at once enduring and unsettled. Across her practice, acts of redaction, repetition, and reassembly foreground the instability of meaning itself.
Installation view: Alexander Gray Associates, Frieze New York, 2026
Together, these artists articulate a shared concern with what persists—across time, across geographies, across forms—and what remains unresolved. Their works propose that abstraction is not an escape from history, but a means of encountering it anew: as something felt, contested, and continually in the process of becoming.
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