British-Iranian artist Kour Pour has quickly developed a reputation for meticulously composed and delicately rendered artworks that intersect diverse material and aesthetic traditions, allowing for a remapping of the standard understanding of “Eastern/Western” cultural exchange. Appropriating forms and techniques from numerous cultures and time periods, Pour’s truly global vision weaves together representational imagery, abstract patterning, and ornamental elements to create new hybrid artworks—equally ancient, classical, and contemporary—that are a constellation of influences from Iran, Britain, Egypt, India, and China, among others. This piece, TBT, draws influence from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ink painting traditions, contemplating the tiger as an ambiguous actor—simultaneously distinctive and camouflaged, beautiful and dangerous, but sometimes depicted as cute, funny, or even not of this world. This ambiguity, reinforced through Pour's multiple techniques, makes the image into more than that of a tiger—the tiger becomes an enigmatic being with indeterminate grounding. Pour says of the series, “There is also an element of surrealism in these works, a floating feeling, an in-between space. The tigers seem to be leaving their environments in the background to step forward and emerge into new territory.”

Once framed, the work can be hung by wire or D-rings.

Provenance

Artist Studio, NYC
Private Collection
Kavi Gupta, Chicago

Exhibitions

Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami, 2020