The Tehran, Iran-born, New York-based artist Y.Z. Kami studied philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Sorbonne before he began his career as an artist. His paintings and drawings have been inspired by sources from Sufi poetry to Islamic architecture, but the overriding theme of his art is the tension between mortal, corporeal life, and the intangible, irreducible soul.

Two massive Kami portraits on view at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery embody this insoluble riddle with quiet force. Each depicts its subject in a state of meditation. Kami’s soft-focus brushwork plays like an open acknowledgment of the impossibility of truthfully reproducing a human face — how many of us have looked at photographs of ourselves and seen someone we find utterly unrecognizable?