Kour Pour, Mother Nature, 2023; Original Painting

**These original works are available via private sale only. Please email hello@artforchange.com with your interest. 


Kour Pour is a British-Iranian-American artist whose visual language is informed by the longstanding, global traditions of intercultural exchange. Within his practice, the artist combines techniques that include block-printing, silkscreening, hand-painting, and sanding to create works that explore the visual histories of the present-day world. By intersecting a wide range of material and aesthetic conventions that are connected to different geographic, cultural and national heritages, Pour allows for a remapping of the standard understanding of the dichotomy between East and West. Based in Los Angeles, he has presented solo exhibitions both domestically and internationally, at venues that include Gallery 1957, London, United Kingdom; Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Shrine and Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY; Pearl Lam Gallery, Hong Kong, China; and GNYP Gallery, Berlin, Germany.

Centered on a tiger surrounded by various other animal species, Mother Nature (2024) stems from a body of work that builds on the tradition of Korean minhwa painting. Dating back to the late fourteenth century, the genre often features images of tigers and magpies, both of which are important symbols within Korean folklore. These iconographic figures also recur in Chinese and Japanese visual traditions, as a reflection of the interconnectedness between the traditions of the three East Asian nations. Pour’s interest in the genre stems precisely from the obscurity of the originating culture, as he finds pleasure in the spirit of exchange. To further conflate both time and space, the artist uses primary colors for his composition, as a nod towards early Modernist painters such as Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, and the Bauhaus school.


Kour Pour
Mother Nature, 2023
Oil, acrylic, and block-printing ink on canvas
43 x 32 inches

With environmental conservation a central tenet of ART FOR CHANGE’s mission, the artists invited for this exhibition confront and contribute to the move toward sustainability by exploring nature and the environment through content, methods, inspiration, or process. In conjunction with the exhibition, ART FOR CHANGE and Phillips will plant 1,000 trees to help counter the CO2 emissions produced by the art industry.

For this collaboration between Phillips and ART FOR CHANGE, Pour notes, “My work often deals, both directly and indirectly, with the natural world. Whether in my paintings of carpets, tigers or maps, the environment and nature are direct concerns. Cultural exchange is driven not only by societal forces, but by natural ones too; weather events and climate catastrophes have driven people to migrate and to meld their culture with another. My carpets are aerial views of gardens, and the tigers that I paint are endangered animals that exist in landscapes marred by deforestation. These issues are always on my mind.”