Artist Kour Pour has spent the past decade challenging the Euro-American art historical canon through his research and artwork. His latest exhibition "Finding My Way Home" at Nazarian Curcio gallery in Los Angeles showcases shaped canvas paintings that question the Western narrative of abstraction's origins. The show marks Pour's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in ten years and represents a culmination of his ongoing research into how non-Western cultures influenced modern art.
Pour's journey began in 2015 with a research project titled "Re-Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925," which directly responded to the Museum of Modern Art's 2012-13 exhibition "Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925." The MoMA exhibition claimed that abstraction was invented by Western artists in the early 20th century. Pour created a zine by annotating the MoMA exhibition catalog with yellow highlighter and red ink, correcting what he saw as short-sighted interpretations of art history.
When former MoMA Director Glenn Lowry wrote that abstraction was "modernism's greatest innovation" with "radically new works first appearing quite suddenly only a century ago," Pour responded in the margins with a simple question: "Really?" During a January visit to his Inglewood studio, Pour pointed out the irony that Lowry holds a doctorate in Islamic art history. "The whole premise of Islamic art is to abstract from nature," Pour explained, arguing that the myth of European invention of abstraction must be challenged.
In his annotated catalog, Pour placed reproductions of artworks from non-Western cultures alongside famous Western pieces to show their similarities. He paired Tantric Hindu paintings from the 5th and 6th centuries with Kazimir Malevich's "Black Square" from 1915, noting they were nearly indistinguishable. He also juxtaposed Inca textiles with Piet Mondrian's De Stijl compositions and placed Persian manuscripts alongside Frank Stella's irregular polygon paintings.
Pour's current body of work consists of shaped canvases that began in 2022 as part of his ongoing "Geometry + Architecture" series that started in 2018. These acrylic paintings serve as the culmination of his informal art historical research and intervention. "In many ways, this show was 10 years in the making," Pour said. "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."
The artist's research was validated when he discovered art historian Sarah-Neel Smith's 2022 essay about Frank Stella's formative 1963 trip to Iran. Smith's research confirmed the formal connections Pour had identified in his 2015 zine, arguing that Stella's irregular polygons from 1965 to 1967 resulted from his encounter with Islamic architecture in Iran, particularly the 14th-century mausoleum Sultaniyya. Despite claiming he was "getting pretty tired of Islamic art," Stella returned to New York with renewed desire to experiment with his formal language, using Islamic art as his blueprint.
Pour incorporates biographical elements into his paintings that reflect his British and Iranian background while referencing political interference by the United Kingdom and United States in West Asia and North Africa. In "For Your Eyes Only" (2024), he included redacted CIA documents from the US-backed coup of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. Another work, "She Fell In Love With A Foreigner (BP)" (2024), features a screenprinted photograph of Pour and his parents stepping off an airplane in Los Angeles for his uncle's 1989 wedding, with the BP (British Petroleum) logo visible in the background.
"I didn't realize the BP logo in the background until recently," the artist explained. "It's the perfect family photo because I am tying my own history to that of Britain and Iran." The work references how when Mosaddegh successfully nationalized Iran's oil in 1951, the British and Americans worked to derail his plans. Pour repeated the Helios symbol from BP's logo using acrylic paint and stained the shaped canvas with tea bags from British PG Tips and Iranian Sadaf brands, nodding to his dual heritage.
In "Jasper" (2024), Pour deconstructs the American flag while paying homage to Jasper Johns, his son's namesake. The name coincidentally has Persian origins, meaning "treasurer." The work's center features ornamentation and patterns including geometric hexagons and six-pointed stars found in Islamic tilework. The back panel, with horizontal orange paint bands, references Stella's "Star of Persia" series from the late 1960s.
Pour's piece "Under Construction" (2025) demonstrates how his cultural explorations can evoke memories of violence alongside romance and nostalgia. The work's title and formal composition reference Malevich's Suprematist canvases. Pour recreated a to-scale mosaic from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection depicting a Persian garden scene, then placed rectangular canvases he calls "Suprematist bars" directly on top. By obstructing the imagery, he transforms viewers into voyeurs peering into an intimate gathering they weren't invited to join.
The layering of varying formal approaches and cultural references in "Under Construction" encapsulates Pour's thesis for this new body of work: that what people have been conditioned to view as canonical is often informed by visual cultures of the non-Western world that preceded it. While MoMA's "Inventing Abstraction" acknowledged European artists' access to transportation that connected them to other cultures, Pour takes issue with art historians and curators largely failing to acknowledge Europe's cultural extraction.
Pour argues that for non-Western artists of the 20th century emerging from colonial rule, modern art wasn't the opposite of traditional or vernacular culture, but rather its logical continuation. His shaped canvases in the "Geometry and Abstraction" series challenge viewers to understand the crucial role that so-called non-Western artists and artisans played in modern art's formation and to reframe their place in art history. "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 explained. "The things one thinks are purely American are very often informed by other places."
