With his latest series of shaped paintings, layered with meaning and symbolism, the artist Kour Pour insists that the so-called canon is informed by non-Western visual traditions that preceded it.
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| Pour annotated and redacted portions of text for his zine “Re-Inventing Abstraction |
by Tina Barouti, Hyperallergic
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.
