Kour Pour: Finding My Way Home

Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present Finding My Way Home, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Kour Pour. This marks the artist’s debut with the gallery and his first Los Angeles solo exhibition in over a decade. 

Kour Pour’s paintings, which reflect the artist’s own diasporic experience, are defined by their richly layered surfaces and their fusion of form, technique, and meaning. Drawing from his multi-layered heritage, Pour explores the fluid boundaries between cultures, using his practice to reimagine the stories that define and divide. His work reflects the tensions inherent in the experience of being at the intersection of multiple identities, using the languages of painting to explore our connected histories and present-day realities.

In Finding My Way Home, Pour introduces a series of stacked architectural paintings that engage with the formal language of modernist abstraction yet are simultaneously steeped in references to Persian miniature painting, Islamic architecture, and sacred geometry. These works serve as both inventive formal compositions and complex symbolic structures that incorporate a mix of referential fragments, personal narrative, cultural history, and multiple processes.  

The imagery in these new works is drawn from Pour’s personal archive, tracing his family's journey from Iran to the UK, and later to the United States. These histories, however, are not merely personal; they resonate with larger geopolitical narratives—histories of control, revolution, and the fraught relationships between the countries of the Middle East and the West. Pour’s exploration of this shared past incorporates key historical events, including the founding of British Petroleum (BP) in Iran, the CIA-led coup of 1953, and the significant 1963 visit of American artist Frank Stella to Iran, an encounter that helped alter the trajectory of American abstraction.

Pour’s work, at its core, navigates the space between cultures and examines the histories that have shaped them. As an artist who holds citizenship in the United States, but who is simultaneously Iranian and British, his perspective resists reductive or essentialist views of identity. Instead, his paintings open a space for complex and nuanced dialogues between seemingly disparate worlds, asking how history, culture, and memory intersect and influence one another.

In conjunction with Finding My Way Home, Pour will also curate a group exhibition at the gallery titled Mehmooni (the Persian word for gathering or party) that highlights the rich artistic landscape of Los Angeles, home to the largest Iranian diaspora in the world. This exhibition will be the second part of the inaugural show that Pour initiated at his Inglewood project space, Guest House, in 2022. The presentation will feature LA-based Iranian artists Shagha Ariannia, Farshid Bazmandegan, Lauren Elder, Amir H.  Fallah, Asad Faulwell, Nasim Hantehzadeh, Aryana Minai, Nicolette Mishkan, Ardeshir Tabrizi, and Haniko Zahra, furthering the exploration of Iranian culture and its intersection with contemporary American art.

Additionally, Pour will host Tehran's Dastan Gallery for an exhibition at Guest House – their third annual collaboration – which will offer a deeper insight into the dynamic exchange between Iranian and international art practices.

Finding My Way Home, through its sophisticated blending of personal history, cultural memory, and artistic innovation, invites viewers to reconsider the ways in which art serves as both a reflection and an agent of history—challenging fixed narratives and opening new possibilities for understanding identity in a globalized world.

Kour Pour (b. 1987, Exeter, UK; Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Select solo exhibitions include Nazarian / Curcio, Los Angeles, CA; Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Gallery 1957, London, UK; and Shrine/Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY. Pour’s work was recently included in Spirit House at Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA. Additional group exhibitions include Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL; Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Museum, Tokyo, Japan; and Dastan’s Basement, Tehran, Iran. Pour’s work has been reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, Galerie Magazine, Hypebeast, Newcity Art, Architectural Digest, ARTnews, Tokyo Weekender, and Ocula. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Art Jameel Collection, UAE; The Bunker Artspace, USA; Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation, Bangladesh; Orange County Museum of Art, USA; Perez Art Museum Miami, USA; and the Yageo Foundation, Taiwan. 

Kour Pour: Celestial Diagrams opens at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Canada on February 25, 2025. The exhibition features three monumental paintings that blend elements of Persian carpets, mandalas, and zodiac charts, drawing inspiration from celestial and terrestrial designs from diverse artistic traditions to reveal a shared quest across cultures to comprehend our vast, interconnected cosmic order.