Kour Pour, Intimidating Tiger, 2022; Work on Paper

Inspired by his personal experience of living between cultures, Kour Pour’s practice is a meditation on global exchange, identity and migration. His visually complex paintings, prints, sculptures and collages draw upon non-Western craft and decorative traditions as a way of reevaluating their assigned value in relation to that of European and American art. While Iranian carpet motifs frequent these works, they are intended not as a reflection of his upbringing, and instead of the journeys shared universally by immigrants. Born in England and based in Los Angeles, the artist has presented solo and two-person exhibitions at Kavi Gupta, Shane Campbell Gallery, Pearl Lam Gallery, and GNYP Gallery.

In these three works, Hungry Tiger, Intimidating Tiger, and Gazing Tiger, Pour has created three unique works on paper, each composed by way of a hand-painted block printing process that he developed for a recent body of work. Similar to his renowned paintings which integrate visual components from Persian carpets, they contain elements that reference both global art history and various interconnected cultural iconographies. Each piece features a tightly cropped view of a tiger, a figure often found in historical ink paintings from China, Korea and Japan. Expressing unique emotional states, the animal subjects are rendered in a primary color palette suggestive of early Modernists and the Bauhaus, connecting Western art to early, global histories.