The Armory Show : Daniel Gibson, iris yirei hu, Reuven Israel, Ken Gun Min, Kour Pour, and Summer Wheat.

Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present works by Los Angeles based artist Daniel Gibson,  Los Angeles based artist iris yirei hu, Brooklyn based artist Reuven Israel, Los Angeles based artist Ken Gun Min,  Los Angeles based artist Kour Pour and Brooklyn based artist Summer Wheat. 

Daniel Gibson (b. 1977, Yuma, AZ) is a Mexican American artist whose surreal, symbol-rich paintings draw on the desert landscapes and seasides of Southern and Baja California to explore themes of identity, migration, resilience, and memory. Employing references to the natural world while speaking to hardships and freedom, his work conjures dreamlike guardians and anthropomorphic flora as proxies for the people navigating the desert, reshaping bleak realities with fantastical narratives rooted in his familial past and experiences growing up along the California Mexico border.

iris yirei hu (b. Los Angeles, CA) is a multidisciplinary, journey-based artist whose practice spans painting, installation, intercultural collaboration, writing, and public art. Rooted in material and spiritual transformation, her labor-intensive works explore grief and loss, cycles of life and death, and the evolving nature of self. Attuned to the sentience of the natural world and the vulnerability of human connection, she creates poetic spaces that invite reflection across cultural, geographic, and generational differences, offering fluid and relational ways of understanding oneself in relation to others. 

Reuven Israel (b. 1978, Jerusalem) creates sculptural works that engage directly with form and color, drawing on cultural references ranging from religious monuments to science fiction. These influences merge into autonomous abstract sculptures that feel familiar through a rich range of signifiers, yet remain unanchored to any specific context. Though they appear industrially fabricated, his works are meticulously handcrafted from medium density fiberboard through a process of cutting, gluing, laminating, and sanding, then finished with industrial paints and lacquers. The sculptures play with visual deception, as wood mimics metal and plastic, and handmade forms pose as utilitarian objects.

Ken Gun Min (b. 1976, Seoul, Korea) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose paintings explore intimacy, masculinity, and representation across cultures, while employing a mixture of western-style oil paints, Asian pigments, embroidery, and beading on raw canvas. Often featuring nude and queer-coded men, his portraits and lush and vibrant landscapes concoct fanciful queer idylls where longing, melancholy, and euphoria manifest irrespective of expectations imposed on people in daily life. With a peripatetic background shaped by time in San Francisco, Zurich, and Berlin, Min’s practice calls first-world-oriented perspectives into question and focuses on the creation of cross-cultural figures and spaces by integrating eastern and western painting styles on a single plane. Through both technical application and composed scenes, his work challenges conceptions of sexuality, gender, and race, especially as depicted in Western art history.

Kour Pour (b. 1987, Exeter, England) is a British-Iranian-American artist whose work is deeply rooted in global cultural exchanges. Growing up in a mixed-race household and newly American, his experience as an immigrant is central to his practice. Drawing from visual languages including Islamic patterning, Japanese woodblock prints, and Korean Minhwa folk art, Pour creates hybrid artworks through hand-cut block prints, silkscreened images, and traditional techniques. His work explores the fluid boundaries between cultures and identities, highlighting the interconnectedness of diverse artistic traditions. 

Summer Wheat (b. 1977, Oklahoma City, OK) creates vibrant paintings, multifaceted sculptures, and immersive installations that intertwine the histories of materiality, figuration, and abstraction across both fine art and craft traditions. Drawing from a wide range of references—from ancient art and medieval tapestries to Renaissance etchings and modernist abstraction—Wheat explores human experiences shaped by labor, leisure, commerce, and class. Her densely populated compositions feature figures such as farmers, hunters, weavers, and movie stars, collapsing time to create egalitarian spaces where every person shares a role in healing humanity. With humor inspired by comic strips, she subverts hierarchical structures to expand depictions of daily life throughout history. Labor functions as a conceptual and formal thread throughout her practice, both in subject matter and in her physically demanding process. Using tools like syringes, scrapers, and cake decorating paraphernalia, she pushes vibrant acrylic paint through wire mesh or works directly on impastoed surfaces. Her intuitive use of color and material disrupts boundaries between figure and ground, representation and abstraction, creating vivid, layered compositions that reimagine history, mythology, and folklore.