LOS ANGELES — 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 “Re-Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925” that was later published as a zine and distributed for a 2017 exhibition at San Francisco’s Ever Gold Projects.
The zine’s title puts a spin on the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) 2012–13 exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, 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’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 appearing “quite suddenly” only a century ago. Pour responded to Lowry’s claims in the margins of the text with a simple question: “Really?”
“Did you know that Lowry has a doctorate in Islamic art history? The whole premise of Islamic art is to abstract from nature,” 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.
In addition to his frustrated critiques in the Inventing Abstraction catalog’s margins, Pour cut-and-pasted reproductions of artworks from Western art history’s periphery, such as Persian manuscripts and Islamic tilework, directly onto the bookplates. On one page, he paired Tantric Hindu paintings, the earliest of which date back to the 5th and 6th centuries, with Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” (1915). The two are nearly indistinguishable. On another, Inca textiles are paired with Piet Mondrian’s De Stijl compositions, and Persian manuscripts are placed together with irregular polygon paintings by a giant of American modernism: Frank Stella.
Pour’s latest body of work consists of shaped canvases he began in 2022 as part of his Geometry + Architecture series (2018–ongoing). These acrylic paintings, which debuted at Nazarian Curcio in February in Finding My Way Home, his first LA solo exhibition in a decade, serve as a culmination of this 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.”
While conducting research for the Geometry + Architecture series, he discovered art historian Sarah-Neel Smith’s 2022 essay on Frank Stella’s formative 1963 trip to Iran. Smith’s research affirmed the formal connections Pour had made in his zine back in 2015, arguing that Stella’s 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 “getting pretty tired of Islamic art,” Stella returned to New York with a renewed desire to experiment with his formal language, using the Islamic art he absorbed as a blueprint.
By conversing with the work of Stella and other figures in the canon of modern art history, Pour’s 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’s political meddling in West Asia and North Africa.
In “For Your Eyes Only” (2024), for instance, Pour included redacted CIA documents 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 parents descending from an airplane after landing in Los Angeles for his uncle’s wedding in 1989. Behind them is the logo for BP or British Petroleum, formerly known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. “I didn’t realize the BP logo in the background until recently,” the artist told me. “It’s the perfect family photo because I am tying my own history to that of Britain and Iran.” When Mossadegh successfully nationalized Iran’s 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’s logo using acrylic paint and stained the shaped canvas with tea bags from the British PG Tips and Iranian Sadaf brands — a nod to his dual heritage.
In “Jasper” (2024), Pour deconstructs the American flag and pays homage to Jasper Johns, his son’s namesake. (Coincidentally, the name is of Persian origin and means “treasurer.”) 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’s “Star of Persia” series from the late 1960s.
While Pour’s exploration of these cultural encounters can feel at times romantic and nostalgic, they also conjure up memories of violence. Pour’s description of “Under Construction” (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.
The title and formal composition of Pour’s shaped canvas reference the Suprematist canvases of Malevich. For the piece, Pour recreated a to-scale mosaic from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection depicting a Persian garden scene and placed rectangular canvases he calls “Suprematist bars” directly on top of the painting. By obstructing the imagery, he turns us into voyeurs who peer into an intimate gathering we weren’t invited to. The layering of varying formal approaches and cultural references in “Under Construction” encapsulates Pour’s thesis for this new body of work: that what we’ve 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 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’s cultural extraction. Additionally, for non-Western artists of the 20th century who were emerging from colonial rule, modern art wasn’t the diametrical opposite of traditional or vernacular culture, but rather its logical continuation. Pour’s 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.
“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.”
