Kour Pour, “Twice Removed” (2025), acrylic, block ink, and esphand on formed canvases (all pictures courtesy Kour Pour Studio, except in any other case famous)
LOS ANGELES — For artist Kour Pour, difficult the Euro-American artwork historic canon has been a decade-long pursuit. In 2015, the artist started a analysis mission titled “Re-Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925” that was later revealed as a zine and distributed for a 2017 exhibition at San Francisco’s Ever Gold Initiatives.
The zine’s title places a spin on the Museum of Trendy Artwork’s (MoMA) 2012–13 exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, which claimed the titular decade and a half as comprising the early historical past of abstraction and designated the style as an invention of the West. For his zine, Pour annotated the MoMA exhibition catalog’s essays with a yellow highlighter and a red-ink pen, correcting the authors’ short-sighted understanding of abstraction. Former MoMA Director Glenn Lowry’s foreword for the catalog argued that “abstraction may be modernism’s greatest innovation” with its “radically new” works first showing “quite suddenly” solely a century in the past. Pour responded to Lowry’s claims within the margins of the textual content with a easy query: “Really?”
Kour Pour in his studio with the unique annotated “Re-Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925” (picture Tina Barouti/Hyperallergic)
“Did you know that Lowry has a doctorate in Islamic art history? The whole premise of Islamic art is to abstract from nature,” Pour famous to me throughout my go to in January to his studio in Inglewood, Los Angeles. For him, abstraction visualizes the fundamental ideas of the pure world, and the parable that European artists invented it within the early twentieth century have to be challenged. Pour, maybe greatest recognized for his large, hyperrealistic work of Persian carpets, typically incorporates parts of Persian and Islamic iconography in his oeuvre. He additionally attracts from Japanese woodblock prints and Korean folks artwork whereas using portray, sculpture, hand-cut block prints, silkscreen pictures, and varied conventional strategies.
Along with his annoyed critiques within the Inventing Abstraction catalog’s margins, Pour cut-and-pasted reproductions of artworks from Western artwork historical past’s periphery, similar to Persian manuscripts and Islamic tilework, straight onto the bookplates. On one web page, he paired Tantric Hindu work, the earliest of which date again to the fifth and sixth centuries, with Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” (1915). The 2 are almost indistinguishable. On one other, Inca textiles are paired with Piet Mondrian’s De Stijl compositions, and Persian manuscripts are positioned along with irregular polygon work by an enormous of American modernism: Frank Stella.
Artist Kour Pour (picture by Errol Sabinano, picture courtesy the artist)
Pour’s newest physique of labor consists of formed canvases he started in 2022 as a part of his Geometry + Structure collection (2018–ongoing). These acrylic work, which debuted at Nazarian Curcio in February in Discovering My Method House, his first LA solo exhibition in a decade, function a fruits of this casual artwork historic analysis and intervention.
“In many ways, this show was 10 years in the making,” Pour stated. “The fact that Western art history has drawn from the visual culture of various places around the world is a theme that always runs through my work.”
Whereas conducting analysis for the Geometry + Structure collection, he found artwork historian Sarah-Neel Smith’s 2022 essay on Frank Stella’s formative 1963 journey to Iran. Smith’s analysis affirmed the formal connections Pour had made in his zine again in 2015, arguing that Stella’s irregular polygons from 1965 to 1967 have been a results of his encounter with Islamic structure in Iran, significantly the 14th-century mausoleum Sultaniyya. Regardless of lamenting that he was “getting pretty tired of Islamic art,” Stella returned to New York with a renewed want to experiment along with his formal language, utilizing the Islamic artwork he absorbed as a blueprint.
Pour annotated and redacted parts of textual content for his zine “Re-Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925” (left) and pasted a picture of a Tantric Hindu portray from the fifth–sixth centuries subsequent to Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 “Black Square” (proper).
By conversing with the work of Stella and different figures within the canon of recent artwork historical past, Pour’s formed canvases disrupt it. He additionally sprinkles biographical parts into the work to replicate his British and Iranian background, whereas slyly referencing the UK and the USA’s political meddling in West Asia and North Africa.
In “For Your Eyes Only” (2024), as an illustration, Pour included redacted CIA paperwork from the US-backed coup of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. In “She Fell In Love With A Foreigner (BP)” (2024), he screenprinted {a photograph} of himself and his dad and mom descending from an airplane after touchdown in Los Angeles for his uncle’s marriage ceremony in 1989. Behind them is the brand for BP or British Petroleum, previously referred to as the Anglo-Persian Oil Firm. “I didn’t realize the BP logo in the background until recently,” the artist advised me. “It’s the perfect family photo because I am tying my own history to that of Britain and Iran.” When Mossadegh efficiently nationalized Iran’s oil in 1951, the British, aided by the US, did all the things of their energy to derail his plans. Right here, Pour repeated the Helios image from BP’s emblem utilizing acrylic paint and stained the formed canvas with tea baggage from the British PG Ideas and Iranian Sadaf manufacturers — a nod to his twin heritage.
Kour Pour, “She Fell In Love With A Foreigner (BP)” (2024), acrylic, block ink, and tea on formed canvases
In “Jasper” (2024), Pour deconstructs the American flag and pays homage to Jasper Johns, his son’s namesake. (Coincidentally, the identify is of Persian origin and means “treasurer.”) Within the middle of the work, he used ornamentation and sample, together with geometric hexagons and six-pointed stars present in Islamic tilework. The again panel of the work, that includes horizontal bands of orange paint, references Stella’s “Star of Persia” collection from the late Nineteen Sixties.
Whereas Pour’s exploration of those cultural encounters can really feel at occasions romantic and nostalgic, additionally they conjure up recollections of violence. Pour’s description of “Under Construction” (2025) throughout our studio go to jogged my memory of an anecdote my grandmother shared with me about life in Bandar Anzali, an Iranian port metropolis occupied on and off by Soviet forces within the first half of the twentieth century. Younger ladies have been typically saved inside to guard them from the overseas troopers who would stick their fingers and gun barrels by way of barred doorways and home windows of personal properties to taunt and flirt.
The title and formal composition of Pour’s formed canvas reference the Suprematist canvases of Malevich. For the piece, Pour recreated a to-scale mosaic from the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork’s assortment depicting a Persian backyard scene and positioned rectangular canvases he calls “Suprematist bars” straight on high of the portray. By obstructing the imagery, he turns us into voyeurs who peer into an intimate gathering we weren’t invited to. The layering of various formal approaches and cultural references in “Under Construction” encapsulates Pour’s thesis for this new physique of labor: that what we’ve been conditioned to view as canonical is usually knowledgeable by visible cultures of the non-Western world that preceded it.
Pages from Pour’s “Re-Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925” that includes an Inca textile paired with Piet Mondrian’s De Stijl compositions (left) and a 1488 Persian miniature portray juxtaposed with Structuralist drawings
Whereas MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction acknowledged European artists’ entry to planes, trains, and cars that linked them to different cultures, Pour takes subject with the truth that artwork historians and curators largely fail to acknowledge Europe’s cultural extraction. Moreover, for non-Western artists of the twentieth century who have been rising from colonial rule, fashionable artwork wasn’t the diametrical reverse of conventional or vernacular tradition, however slightly its logical continuation. Pour’s formed canvases within the Geometry and Abstraction collection problem us to know the essential function that so-called non-Western artists and artisans performed within the formation of recent artwork and, in the end, to reframe their place in artwork historical past.
“If Stella is one of the most famous American artists and he was so heavily influenced by his trip to Iran, that’s something worth sharing,” Pour defined. “The things one thinks are purely American are very often informed by other places.”
