Tiger Paintings
Kour Pour
February 21 - March 7, 2022
Monochrome Tiger, 2022
Block printing ink on canvas
80 x 65 x 1.5 in (203.2 x 165.1 x 3.8 cm)
COUNTY is pleased to present Tiger Paintings, a solo exhibition by Kour Pour.
In celebration of 2022, the Year of the Tiger, COUNTY is pleased to present Tiger Paintings, a solo exhibition by Kour Pour.
Visually hypnotic and historically astute, Kour Pour’s Tiger Paintings reveal forgotten connections among East Asian, European, and Persian art-making traditions, using the tiger motif to remap our understanding of cross-cultural exchange. Pour’s strong sense of shape and shadow recalls German Expressionist aesthetics, and his pulsating stripes build upon Bridget Riley’s experiments in perceptual abstraction. The tigers themselves have journeyed across multiple civilizations, copied and modified by innumerable artists, before ending up in this show. In Pour’s X-ray-like vision, they transform once again, their white stripes crackling like lightning in a mysterious mist.
The stylistic diversity of Pour’s tigers is inspired, in part, by minhwa, a Korean folk painting tradition that borrows freely from disparate sources. Korean minhwa artists would sometimes imitate Chinese or Japanese tiger paintings that were themselves derived from Korean originals—an example of cultural transmission coming full circle. But Kour is also interested in how these same East Asian tiger motifs were adopted by Persian miniaturists in the thirteenth century and German Expressionists in the twentieth. Franz Marc and Heinrich Campendonk, for instance, both made woodcuts of tigers in the Japanese ukiyo-e style.
The block printing technique Pour uses for his one-of-a-kind paintings is significantly more strenuous than that of his Japanese and German predecessors. For his largest pieces, he physically crawls across the backs of the canvases while burnishing them with a baren, a traditional Japanese printmaking tool. The sheer physicality of the process creates a mottled, patina-like surface suggestive of mist or fog, but which is the literal imprint of the artist’s own body. Pour compares it to the atmospheric effects prized by Chinese landscape painters, who often strove to depict invisible forces, such as wind.
Rather than placing his Tiger Paintings in any one art-historical lineage, Pour recognizes that the work is a confluence of global traditions that have been interacting with one another for centuries. Astonishingly powerful images in their own right, the Tiger Paintings are also a bridge to history.
A Los Angeles-based artist of Persian and British decent, Kour Pour is known for his meticulously composed artworks which intersect diverse material and aesthetic traditions. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Gallery 1957, London, 2022; Wild Garden, a dual-venue presentation at SHRINE and Sargent’s Daughters, NYC, 2021; Familiar Spirits at Kavi Gupta, Chicago 2021; Returnee at The Club, Tokyo, 2019; Manzareh/Keshiki/Landscape at Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, 2019; Abrash at Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, 2018; Polypainting at Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, 2018, and GNYP Gallery, Berlin, 2018. Select group exhibitions include A Boundless Drop to a Boundless Ocean at the Orlando Museum of Art; Decoration Never Dies, Anyway at Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Museum, Tokyo, 2017; and Labyrinth(s) at Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, 2016. A solo exhibition at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran is forthcoming in 2022.
Logan R. Beitmen