Kour Pour

Kour Pour was born in 1987 in Exeter, England, to a British mother and an Iranian father who ran a carpet shop; time spent in that shop as a child left a lasting imprint on his visual vocabulary. He is generally described as a British-born American artist of British-Iranian descent. He attended Santa Monica College before transferring to Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, where he earned a BFA in 2010. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Pour's paintings and prints layer imagery drawn from Persian rugs, East Asian woodblock prints, and other decorative and religious traditions into dense, patterned compositions that treat ornament as historical and cultural content rather than mere surface decoration. The work is frequently framed around hybridity, migration, and the convergence of multiple visual histories within a single canvas.

His public profile rose quickly in the mid-2010s: a 2014 solo presentation with UNTITLED in New York reportedly sold out, with individual canvases priced around USD 15,000, and he was named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in the Art and Style category in 2015, with at least one gallery source also crediting him with the same recognition in 2017. Subsequent solo exhibitions followed in Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Berlin, Hong Kong, Dublin, and Tokyo, and his work has appeared in group exhibitions including Spirit House at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, on view into January 2026. A solo exhibition, Cosmic Diagrams, opened at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto in 2025 and was scheduled to run into 2026.

Pour has drawn sustained critical and institutional attention for treating pattern and ornament as a carrier of history rather than decoration, weaving together Persian carpet motifs, East Asian print traditions, and Western abstraction into a single pictorial language. Sotheby's has profiled him in its own editorial coverage of his working process, and his exhibition history includes group presentations such as Spirit House at the Henry Art Gallery and a dedicated 2025 to 2026 solo presentation, Cosmic Diagrams, at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.

Pour's public auction history is limited relative to his exhibition record. The most widely cited high-value auction result is a 2015 sale at Sotheby's in Doha, Qatar, where a painting titled Love Child sold for USD 162,500 against a pre-sale estimate of roughly USD 70,000 to 90,000. The exact day of that sale is not consistently reported across sources. No confirmed higher public sale has been documented since. Most of his output moves through primary representation with Nazarian/Curcio in Los Angeles and Kavi Gupta in Chicago rather than the secondary market, which is typical for an artist of his generation still early in his auction history.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Pour, and his public auction record currently rests on a single well-documented high-value sale from 2015. That thinness means any auction-based read on value should be treated cautiously rather than as a stable price trend. The stronger signal for this artist is his sustained institutional exhibition history, including a current solo presentation at the Aga Khan Museum, and his continuing primary representation through Nazarian/Curcio and Kavi Gupta, both of which remain the most reliable channels for acquiring current work.