Kour Pour

Description

Kour Pour presents for the first time a concentrated look at Kour Pour's artistic output from 2009-2019. Working primarily with painting and printmaking, the artist is known for producing vivid and decorative canvases that are built up in many layers and the result of detailed hand painting, silkscreen printing, and sanding. Concurrently, Pour has produced large-scale, hand-carved woodblock and linocut paintings that are also presented in this publication. The artist draws from a wide range of source material such as Oriental carpets, Persian miniature paintings, Japanese ukiyo-e prints to geological maps and package design from around the world. In each series of paintings, these images are treated in various manners. Some works appear as straightforward or slightly altered reproductions. Other times Pour creates works by combining multiple sources into single compositions. The artist also crops, fragments, and abstracts to create new interpretations of familiar cultural imagery. Stylistically the paintings move from one formal discipline to another: from highly patterned and decorative canvases to minimalist geometric surfaces and color field painting. It is within the multiplicity of works that certain themes recur such as the role of originality and appropriation within cultural exchange, to the way that identity can affect how art is viewed and valued. The ecstatic energy found throughout Pour's practice is in part the product of the artist's biography, as well as the movement of people, objects and images that takes place through travel and technology in 21st-century cosmopolitan life.

Kour Pour (b. Exeter, England 1987) currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California, United States. He received a B.F.A. from the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA. in 2010. Alex Bacon is a Curatorial Associate at the Princeton University Art Museum. He is an art historian based in New York City who regularly writes criticism and organizes exhibitions of both contemporary and historical art. Shiva Balaghi is a cultural historian of the Middle East, who teaches Art History and History at Brown University. Balaghi is a Contributing Editor of Jadaliyya and a Trustee of the American Institute of Iranian Studies. She has taught at UVM, NYU, and U-M, and received her PhD in History from the University of Michigan. Masako Tanaka is a curator at the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum.