Kour Pour, Birth Chart (Finding My Way Home), 2024 (Courtesy of Nazarian Curcio)
A new review at Nazarian Curcio; and as everyone gears up ahead of the immanent art fairs and Black History Month takes shape, exciting new shows open at the weekend and into early next week at Southern Guild, Rele Gallery, Jeffrey Deitch two ways, Moskowitz Bayse, Diane Rosenstein Gallery, and Hauser & Wirth in both DTLA and WeHo. Plus it’s opening night at the first pair of fairs (Felix and the LA Art Show), MOCA has a feminist video art mini-festival, the legendary Batsheva Dance Company sojourns in Los Angeles, and LACE are once again the only folks who know what we really want for Valentine’s. Hint: It’s witchy.
PS: We’re having a subscribers-only appreciation cocktail nosh this Wednesday night (February 12) and there’s also a new paid subscriber chat salon feature on our site that’s still in beta but already so cute! If you are a paid supporter, check your email for forthcoming conversations; and if you need a reason to upgrade, there’s more than just the reviews and heartfelt recommendations on the table. There is also charcuterie. So… will you be our Valentine?
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Kour Pour, Setareh/Stella, 2024. Acrylic and block ink on shaped canvases, 64 x 64 x 3 in (Courtesy of Nazarian Curcio)
REVIEW: Kour Pour: Finding My Way Home opens Saturday, February 15, 6-8pm at Nazarian Curcio. Lately known for his architecturally scaled and telescopically detailed Persian carpet-formated mixed media paintings offering a dizzying scope of fine detail embedding cultural, historical, spiritual, and deeply personal narrative symbols into an evocative textile motif, Kour’s newest paintings in some ways literally unravel and reconstruct it all. Pour’s jaunty evolving compositional format is constructed from architectural armatures and pattern-based motifs culled from these same stories, but rendered in metonymical engineered forms that act as both images and objects. Stacking painted single-color building blocks like bars, stars, screens, and crescents creates the profile of a shaped canvas as well as a dimensional evocation of described and inhabited architectures. At the same time as these elements both contain and expand the visual field, they offer a new way to contextualize the range of family immigration documents, geopolitical headlines, generational change, foundational and ancient cultural texts, childhood memories, and symbols of diasporic adulthood that continue to undergird Pour’s investigation of his own synecdochically hybrid identity.
Where the tapestry paintings demonstrated a weaving of elements into a complex whole, these profound, witty, emotional, clever, and gently playful stacked paintings seem to speak to deconstructing the parts of that whole—the better to understand how histories such as his are literally constructed from a panoply of elements. As well, his particular love of shape and pattern as expressed in this work is informed by Frank Stella’s inventive fusion of Eastern decorative impulses into his modernist abstraction enterprise following a 1963 visit to Iran—offering yet another prism through which to understand both movements of global culture and the contours of Pour’s own story. Pour has also curated the gallery’s project space with the Mehmooni Part 2 group exhibition, highlighting the cultural impact of LA’s Iranian diaspora community—the largest in the world. On view in Hollywood through March 22; Backgammon with friends session, Wednesday, February 19, 4-6pm; nazariancurcio.com. —SND
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