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 Fashionable 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 could also be modernism’s biggest innovation” with its “radically new” works first showing “fairly all of a sudden” solely a century in the past. Pour responded to Lowry’s claims within the margins of the textual content with a easy query: “Actually?”
“Do you know that Lowry has a doctorate in Islamic artwork historical past? The entire premise of Islamic artwork is to summary from nature,” Pour famous to me throughout my go to in January to his studio in Inglewood, Los Angeles. For him, abstraction visualizes the essential ideas of the pure world, and the parable that European artists invented it within the early twentieth century have to be challenged. Pour, maybe finest recognized for his huge, hyperrealistic work of Persian carpets, usually incorporates components 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 photos, and numerous 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, resembling Persian manuscripts and Islamic tilework, instantly 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 Sq.” (1915). The 2 are practically 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.
Pour’s newest physique of labor consists of formed canvases he started in 2022 as a part of his Geometry + Structure sequence (2018–ongoing). These acrylic work, which debuted at Nazarian Curcio in February in Discovering My Means Dwelling, his first LA solo exhibition in a decade, function a fruits of this casual artwork historic analysis and intervention.
“In some ways, this present was 10 years within the making,” Pour stated. “The truth that Western artwork historical past has drawn from the visible tradition of assorted locations all over the world is a theme that at all times runs by my work.”
Whereas conducting analysis for the Geometry + Structure sequence, 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 had been a results of his encounter with Islamic structure in Iran, notably the 14th-century mausoleum Sultaniyya. Regardless of lamenting that he was “getting fairly uninterested in Islamic artwork,” Stella returned to New York with a renewed need to experiment along with his formal language, utilizing the Islamic artwork he absorbed as a blueprint.
By conversing with the work of Stella and different figures within the canon of contemporary artwork historical past, Pour’s formed canvases disrupt it. He additionally sprinkles biographical components into the work to replicate his British and Iranian background, whereas slyly referencing the UK and america’s political meddling in West Asia and North Africa.
In “For Your Eyes Solely” (2024), for example, 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 wedding ceremony in 1989. Behind them is the emblem for BP or British Petroleum, previously often called the Anglo-Persian Oil Firm. “I didn’t understand the BP brand within the background till just lately,” the artist instructed me. “It’s the right household photograph as a result of I’m tying my very own historical past to that of Britain and Iran.” When Mossadegh efficiently nationalized Iran’s oil in 1951, the British, aided by the US, did the whole lot of their energy to derail his plans. Right here, Pour repeated the Helios image from BP’s brand utilizing acrylic paint and stained the formed canvas with tea baggage from the British PG Suggestions and Iranian Sadaf manufacturers — a nod to his twin heritage.
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” sequence from the late Sixties.
Whereas Pour’s exploration of those cultural encounters can really feel at instances romantic and nostalgic, in addition they conjure up reminiscences of violence. Pour’s description of “Below Development” (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 had been usually saved inside to guard them from the overseas troopers who would stick their fingers and gun barrels by barred doorways and home windows of personal houses 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” instantly 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 “Below Development” 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.
Whereas MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction acknowledged European artists’ entry to planes, trains, and cars that linked them to different cultures, Pour takes challenge 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 had 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 sequence problem us to grasp the essential function that so-called non-Western artists and artisans performed within the formation of contemporary artwork and, in the end, to reframe their place in artwork historical past.
“If Stella is among the most well-known American artists and he was so closely influenced by his journey to Iran, that’s one thing price sharing,” Pour defined. “The issues one thinks are purely American are fairly often knowledgeable by different locations.”
