The artist Kour Pour isn’t afraid to trade upon his new-found fame for market success. That might be because some of his best known works had their images source from the market in the first place:

“I was thinking about the carpet and its role in the world as an object of craft—people weaving in a community, the history, the patterns, the figures, and even its place as a commodity being traded,” he says. “[Carpets] are also an iconic image that everyone recognizes, so I was attracted to it for those reasons and personal ones.”

Thanks to the power of Instagram, sold-out shows at New York’s Untitled gallery and Dublin’s Ellis King, and Pour’s relationship with the controversial art dealer Stefan Simchowitz, his works have become hotly traded commodities in their own right. “It’s the cycle that I’m interested in,” says Pour. “For the early paintings I made, I would find the images from Sotheby’s catalogues, and now those paintings are starting to show up at auction, so that carpet has gone from being a real carpet to a photograph to a painting back to a photograph, and now it’s in a contemporary art sale. Things transform over time; they become new things with different meanings.”

Kour Pour’s First Solo Exhibition Opens  (Architectural Digest)