{"id":126128,"date":"2025-08-07T10:48:18","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T10:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/126128\/"},"modified":"2025-08-07T10:48:18","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T10:48:18","slug":"kour-pour-reclaims-the-geometry-of-abstraction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/126128\/","title":{"rendered":"Kour Pour Reclaims the Geometry of Abstraction"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\t\tKour Pour, \u201cTwice Removed\u201d (2025), acrylic, block ink, and esphand on shaped canvases (all images courtesy Kour Pour Studio, unless otherwise noted)<\/p>\n

LOS ANGELES \u2014 For artist Kour Pour, challenging the Euro-American art historical canon has been a decade-long pursuit. In 2015, the artist began a research project titled \u201cRe-Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925\u201d that was later published as a zine<\/a> and distributed for a 2017 exhibition<\/a> at San Francisco\u2019s Ever Gold Projects.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The zine\u2019s title puts a spin on the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s (MoMA) 2012\u201313 exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925<\/a>, which claimed the titular decade and a half as comprising the early history of abstraction and designated the genre as an invention of the West. For his zine, Pour annotated the MoMA exhibition catalog<\/a>\u2019s essays with a yellow highlighter and a red-ink pen, correcting the authors\u2019 short-sighted understanding of abstraction. Former MoMA Director Glenn Lowry\u2019s foreword for the catalog argued that \u201cabstraction may be modernism\u2019s greatest innovation\u201d with its \u201cradically new\u201d works first appearing \u201cquite suddenly\u201d only a century ago. Pour responded to Lowry\u2019s claims in the margins of the text with a simple question: \u201cReally?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\tKour Pour in his studio with the original annotated \u201cRe-Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925\u201d (photo Tina Barouti\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n

\u201cDid you know that Lowry has a doctorate in Islamic art history? The whole premise of Islamic art is to abstract from nature,\u201d Pour noted to me during my visit in January to his studio in Inglewood, Los Angeles. For him, abstraction visualizes the basic principles of the natural world, and the myth that European artists invented it in the early 20th century must be challenged. Pour, perhaps best known for his massive, hyperrealistic paintings of Persian carpets, often incorporates elements of Persian and Islamic iconography in his oeuvre. He also draws from Japanese woodblock prints and Korean folk art while utilizing painting, sculpture, hand-cut block prints, silkscreen images, and various traditional techniques.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In addition to his frustrated critiques in the Inventing Abstraction catalog\u2019s margins, Pour cut-and-pasted reproductions of artworks from Western art history\u2019s periphery, such as Persian manuscripts and Islamic tilework, directly onto the bookplates. On one page<\/a>, he paired Tantric Hindu paintings, the earliest of which date back to the 5th and 6th centuries, with Kazimir Malevich\u2019s \u201cBlack Square\u201d (1915). The two are nearly indistinguishable. On another<\/a>, Inca textiles are paired with Piet Mondrian\u2019s De Stijl compositions, and Persian manuscripts are placed together with irregular polygon paintings by a giant of American modernism: Frank Stella.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\tArtist Kour Pour (photo by Errol Sabinano, image courtesy the artist)<\/p>\n

Pour\u2019s latest body of work consists of shaped canvases he began in 2022 as part of his Geometry + Architecture series (2018\u2013ongoing). These acrylic paintings, which debuted at Nazarian Curcio in February in Finding My Way Home<\/a>, his first LA solo exhibition in a decade, serve as a culmination of this informal art historical research and intervention.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn many ways, this show was 10 years in the making,\u201d Pour said. \u201cThe 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

While conducting research for the Geometry + Architecture series, he discovered art historian Sarah-Neel Smith\u2019s 2022 essay<\/a> on Frank Stella\u2019s formative 1963 trip to Iran. Smith\u2019s research affirmed the formal connections Pour had made in his zine back in 2015, arguing that Stella\u2019s irregular polygons from 1965 to 1967 were a result of his encounter with Islamic architecture in Iran, particularly the 14th-century mausoleum Sultaniyya. Despite lamenting that he was \u201cgetting pretty tired of Islamic art,\u201d Stella returned to New York with a renewed desire to experiment with his formal language, using the Islamic art he absorbed as a blueprint.<\/p>\n

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Pour annotated and redacted portions of text for his zine \u201cRe-Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925\u201d (left) and pasted an image of a Tantric Hindu painting from the 5th\u20136th centuries next to Kazimir Malevich\u2019s 1915 \u201cBlack Square\u201d (right).<\/p>\n

By conversing with the work of Stella and other figures in the canon of modern art history, Pour\u2019s shaped canvases disrupt it. He also sprinkles biographical elements into the paintings to reflect his British and Iranian background, while slyly referencing the United Kingdom and the United States\u2019s political meddling in West Asia and North Africa.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In \u201cFor Your Eyes Only<\/a>\u201d (2024), for instance, Pour included redacted CIA documents from the US-backed coup of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. In \u201cShe Fell In Love With A Foreigner (BP)<\/a>\u201d (2024), he screenprinted a photograph of himself and his parents descending from an airplane after landing in Los Angeles for his uncle\u2019s wedding in 1989. Behind them is the logo for BP or British Petroleum, formerly known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. \u201cI didn\u2019t realize the BP logo in the background until recently,\u201d the artist told me. \u201cIt\u2019s the perfect family photo because I am tying my own history to that of Britain and Iran.\u201d\u00a0When Mossadegh successfully nationalized Iran\u2019s oil in 1951, the British, aided by the US, did everything in their power to derail his plans. Here, Pour repeated the Helios symbol from BP\u2019s logo using acrylic paint and stained the shaped canvas with tea bags from the British PG Tips and Iranian Sadaf brands \u2014 a nod to his dual heritage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\tKour Pour, \u201cShe Fell In Love With A Foreigner (BP)\u201d (2024), acrylic, block ink, and tea on shaped canvases<\/p>\n

In \u201cJasper<\/a>\u201d (2024), Pour deconstructs the American flag and pays homage to Jasper Johns, his son\u2019s namesake. (Coincidentally, the name is of Persian origin and means \u201ctreasurer.\u201d) In the center of the work, he used ornamentation and pattern, including geometric hexagons and six-pointed stars found in Islamic tilework. The back panel of the work, featuring horizontal bands of orange paint, references Stella\u2019s \u201cStar of Persia\u201d series from the late 1960s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While Pour\u2019s exploration of these cultural encounters can feel at times romantic and nostalgic, they also conjure up memories of violence. Pour\u2019s description of \u201cUnder Construction<\/a>\u201d (2025) during our studio visit reminded me of an anecdote my grandmother shared with me about life in Bandar Anzali, an Iranian port city occupied on and off by Soviet forces in the first half of the 20th century. Young girls were often kept inside to protect them from the foreign soldiers who would stick their fingers and gun barrels through barred doors and windows of private homes to taunt and flirt. <\/p>\n

The title and formal composition of Pour\u2019s shaped canvas reference the Suprematist<\/a> canvases of Malevich. For the piece, Pour recreated a to-scale mosaic from the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s collection<\/a> depicting a Persian garden scene and placed rectangular canvases he calls \u201cSuprematist bars\u201d directly on top of the painting. By obstructing the imagery, he turns us into voyeurs who peer into an intimate gathering we weren\u2019t invited to. The layering of varying formal approaches and cultural references in \u201cUnder Construction\u201d encapsulates Pour\u2019s thesis for this new body of work: that what we\u2019ve been conditioned to view as canonical is often informed by visual cultures of the non-Western world that preceded it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Pages from Pour\u2019s \u201cRe-Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925\u201d featuring an Inca textile paired with Piet Mondrian\u2019s De Stijl compositions (left) and a 1488 Persian miniature painting juxtaposed with Structuralist drawings<\/p>\n

While MoMA\u2019s Inventing Abstraction acknowledged European artists\u2019 access to planes, trains, and automobiles that connected them to other cultures, Pour takes issue with the fact that art historians and curators largely fail to acknowledge Europe\u2019s cultural extraction. Additionally, for non-Western artists of the 20th century who were emerging from colonial rule, modern art wasn\u2019t the diametrical opposite of traditional or vernacular culture, but rather its logical continuation. Pour\u2019s shaped canvases in the Geometry and Abstraction series challenge us to understand the crucial role that so-called non-Western artists and artisans played in the formation of modern art and, ultimately, to reframe their place in art history.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Stella is one of the most famous American artists and he was so heavily influenced by his trip to Iran, that\u2019s something worth sharing,\u201d Pour explained. \u201cThe things one thinks are purely American are very often informed by other places.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kour Pour, \u201cTwice Removed\u201d (2025), acrylic, block ink, and esphand on shaped canvases (all images courtesy Kour Pour…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":126129,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,1033,171,1322,77480,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-126128","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-featured","13":"tag-geometric-abstraction","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114987093732863430","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126128\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}