For Iraqi American artist Vian Sora, exhibiting in Dubai with her new paintings—mesmerizing compositions of fluid, vivid abstraction—is a full-circle moment. “I was manifesting going back to this region,” she said, surrounded by her artworks at The Third Line, which is hosting its first solo show with the artist through December 5th. A survivor of the Iraq War, Sora, who is of Kurdish origin, escaped from her homeland and sought refuge with her family in the Emirati city back in 2007.

2024 is the year Iraqi-American painter Vian Sora and her work will be seared in our memory forever. Her paintings have recently been acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Shah Garg Foundation. In 2025 she will have a solo traveling exhibition across the US and fresh off a solo booth at the Independent Art Fair in New York, presented by David Nolan Gallery, she is now headed to Dubai with an exhibition at The Third Line gallery.

So, why is Iraqi-American painter Vian Sora's star burning so bright right now? Her work – which focuses on themes of migration and displacement, and concepts of home and belonging – echoes the realities of today. And for this painter, it is a truth she has faced since she had to flee Iraq at the turn of the century.

The gesture of using place as the focal point in her work is born from the Louisville-based artist’s own story which started in Iraq forty-eight years ago. Life showed Sora its unrestful side early on under the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, drifting her to Istanbul at age twenty-nine. She had too leave her family behind but landing on the culturally bubbling crossroad of East and West yielded its magic, too. Migration and settling, as well as adaptation and estrangement, were the realities she was surrounded by in Istanbul in the mid-2000s.

Today, the many faces of life explode and recede in her scorching reds, churning coppers, and turbulent blues on canvas. “The atmospheric landscapes I paint today come from a collective consciousness, from everything happening in one time,” she tells AD.

At first glance, Sora’s paintings are seductive, with oil and powder pigments alchemized into volcanic abstractions. They radiate a tectonic energy that engulfs the viewer. Beneath the surface, however, memories – both personal and shared –linger, hinting at her arduously layered painting process. “Istanbul helped me process the reality of leaving Baghdad in ruins and with my family in danger,” she recollects. Long strolls around the Hagia Sophia and the Golden Horn prompted a realisation of the perpetual collapse and rise of civilisations and their monuments. “There, I was at a mosque which was once a church which had a cistern below,” muses Sora. The erratic entanglement of decay, trauma, and hope in her paintings today echoes with those moments of epiphany which at the time resonated with processing grief as well.”

Sora’s upcoming exhibition at The Third Line in Dubai (where she lived between 2007 and 2009) extends her mixed-media Noosphere series which debuted last May at the artist’s solo booth with David Nolan Gallery at the Independent Art Fair in New York. They capture the synchrony of brutality and beauty with grand gestures of oozing, bursting, or simply bleeding. Nolan tells AD that he was “struck by the pure energy,” when he walked into the artist’s studio. “The transparency in how she uses the colour, the compositions that sometimes seem architectural and the choices in colour that she uses are uniquely hers,” adds the gallerist.

Sora’s handling of the canvas conveys compositions that recall blood clots, volcanic eruptions, or blossoming seasons, daring to force anxiety and anticipation to cohabitate. Bird’s eye view or countless layers deep, the earth is the uncompromising heroine in each juxtaposition. Cartographies of remembrance, traverse between the geographical and the sensory. “My colours are about the layers of the earth and my daily emotions,” says the artist who works from a studio overlooking the Ohio River. “The colours choose themselves and sometimes end up in a completely different direction than where I started,” she adds.

Chance has similarly been a guiding light in different turning points throughout Sora’s journey. She was born to an art gallery owner father and an antique dealer mother who encouraged her to pursue art. “A strong presence of art, architecture, and poetry,” surrounded her upbringing through her parents’ creative circle. “Parents generally expect their children to become a doctor or engineer, but mine wanted me to go to art school,” she remembers. To rebel, she pursued the path of computer engineering, “but I also had access to any art book that a normal child could certainly not.”

When a new chapter started in Istanbul in 2006, she found herself taking printing lessons at the Istanbul Modern Museum and studying calligraphy with artist Süleyman Saim Tekcan at the Istanbul Museum of Graphic Arts. Sora helped him learn Arabic and he passed on to her the technique of working on metal. “A fruitful exchange,” she calls her training process which also took her to other Turkish cities in both east and west, such as Konya, Izmir, Diyarbakir, and Cappadocia. Visiting Göbeklitepe – the neolithic town which some believe to be the oldest civilization site yet discovered – was a transformative experience in her understanding of history’s circular relationship with destruction and rebirth: “I was on a site from 8,000 BCE, once a place of life and horror for its inhabitants but now, it is an artefact for us to visit an take photos.”

Today, Abstraction today provides Sora an array of creative tools in layering the known as well as the unspeakable. Similar to poetry’s ability to translate the cerebral into a vocabulary, strokes of calm or delirious shades free the bond between her and the viewer from a singular conversation.

Vian Sora thrives in abstraction’s promise of “hiding and revealing what I want to tell.” The painter however avoids depriving herself of corporality: “Bodies are always there, deep under the colours.” She responds to the viewer’s urge to find a figure somewhere in the painting. “I am interested in creating a tension, a tight rope that you cannot break if you make a true balance.”

The process of layering various forms of dye gives the surface what Sora describes as a “leather-like finish, similar to how ancient Mesopotamians created murals.” Chaim Soutine’s paintings of poetic ferocity are another inspiration, as well as ancient buildings with their beautifully decaying edifices. This interest in histories indeed keeps the work contemporary and kinetic, like an endlessly burning fire of references, alongside her recent fascination with shades of bronze, gold, terracotta, turquoise, and okra.

After Dubai, Sora will open a new show at the David Nolan Gallery in spring 2025, followed by the most ambitious exhibition of her career: The paintings she created between 2016 and 2024 will be the subject of a travelling show across the United States, starting at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in July of 2025. Later, the Speed Museum in her current hometown Louisville will host the exhibition, and in 2026, the Asia Society in Houston will be the final venue of the survey.

Success on a new remote land resonates with empowerment as much as fragility. “I am embracing everything which leads to a certain agency in the work,” says Vian Sora for whom the courage of signalling hope amidst atrocity is key. “There is a vulnerability in painting something positive, an outcome of a shift in life.”

Independent New York opens on May 9 and with it, Iraqi-American painter Vian Sora will present a new body of work with David Nolan Gallery (Booth 606). This follows acquisitions of her work by the Baltimore Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Shah Garg Foundation, among others, along with recent profiles in Artnet, The Guardian and Vogue Arabia. Hers is a name we’ve encountered by chance several times over the past few months, so when we were presented with the opportunity to ask her a few questions in advance of the May art fair, we jumped at the chance.

Located in the sprawling Miami Beach Convention Center, Art Basel Miami Beach has the luxury of being able to showcase a range of different sectors. One of the most exciting is the Meridians Sector, which allows for large-scale, immersive, and experimental projects that might not otherwise have the chance to be exhibited at an art fair. A highlight of this year’s Meridians Sector is “Abzu”, a new, monumental painting by Vian Sora presented with Los Angeles-based gallery Luis De Jesus. Inspired by her experiences of loss and displacement growing up in Iraq, Sora creates vibrant, abstract paintings with bursts of energy that intend to uplift the artist and the viewer. Now based in Louisville, Sora considers additional themes of body autonomy and women’s rights in her work, using her colorful hues and lively compositions to inspire hope. 

An Iraqi-American artist who was born in Baghdad and is based in Louisville, Kentucky, Vian Sora makes large-scale abstract paintings that deal with themes of war, political upheaval, migration and geographic and clutural displacement. The subject of a current solo show at David Nolan Gallery in New York, Sora studied art in Baghdad and Instanbul before relocating to America. Gesturally painting in a style that's been described as "controlled chaos" the artist applies spray paint, acrylics, pigments and inks on canvas and paper with brushes, sponges, and anything else at hand to create vibrant abstractions with emblematic meanings. 

Following recent acquisitions by the Baltimore Museum of Art and selection for inclusion at Art Basel Miami Beach next month, Iraqi-American painter Vian Sora is presenting her first New York solo exhibition. On view this month at the David Nolan Gallery, the show titled Vian Sora: End of Hostilities consists of abstract, gestural work distilling the artist’s experience of coming of age in Baghdad. Grappling with themes of war, political upheaval, and geographic and cultural displacement, the exhibition takes place just steps away from Manhattan’s iconic Metropolitan Museum of Art at a relevant time for the city. Since the spring of 2022, over 116,000 migrants fleeing hardship in their home countries have gone to New York from the US-Mexico border.

Being a debutant at one of the biggest balls in the art-fair calendar can be a daunting experience. This year, 25 first-time participants, nearly 10 per cent of the total 277 galleries, will set out their stands at Art Basel Miami Beach alongside big-name dealers dominant in the market... Vian Sora’s painting “Abzu” in the Meridians section, a platform for large-scale pieces, is available for $100,000-$200,000.

New York's David Nolan Gallery recently announced representation of the Kentucky-based artist

Chaos is where a work begins but not where it ends for the Iraqi-born, Kentucky-based artist Vian Sora. “My process is very unpredictable at first,” she explained while standing inside “End of Hostilities,” her debut solo show at David Nolan Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (through December 9). “When I start my works, I have them lying completely flat and I make spontaneous initial markings, explosive gestures, that are just playing with material and possibilities. Eventually, this moves into a slower more deliberate process.” 

Hanging on the gallery walls are Sora’s electrically colored canvases, splattered and marked in riotous, even jubilant veils of green, pink, yellow, and bright blue. 

Vian Sora’s vibrant artwork is displayed in a new exhibition that marks the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq

Examining the Iraqi artist Vian Sora’s magnificent paintings, the first thing that stands out is her color palette. A full spectrum of neons – greens, blues, oranges, yellows and reds – drip and seep across earthy ochers and browns. These oppositional colors immediately catch the eye, and then leave a viewer wondering how Sora can so effortlessly situate them alongside each other.

Colors are one of the many oppositions that Sora elegantly reconciles at her debut New York City show, Vian Sora: End of Hostilities, on view at David Nolan Gallery. 

Born and raised in Baghdad, Iraq, during multiple wars, my paintings are infused with emotional tension and based on confronting destruction and decay, challenging boundaries through intentional color contrast within gestural landscapes. My interest is to express untold emotional landscapes to suggest the turmoil that can disturb the thin surface of social order and its effect on the human soul. My paintings suggest figures and places, including gardens and war zones, landscapes of lush fertility and terrible decay, cycles of life and death, that are generating order in chaos.

DUBAI: March 2023 will mark the 20th anniversary of US-led invasion of Iraq, which led to destruction, displacement, and prolonged political instability. One of the millions who witnessed the chaos unfold is the Iraqi-American painter Vian Sora. “There is nothing that I don’t remember,” she says from her atelier in Louisville, Kentucky. 

On the night before the bombing began, Sora, who is of Kurdish origin, drove with her family from Baghdad to the town of Balad Ruz, around 120 kilometers away. “It was so visceral and scary,” she tells Arab News. “We all lived in just one house there — 30 of us slept in one room. We watched the B-52’s bomb Baghdad.”

If you find yourself in need of a message of hope and beauty during these cold January days, visit the Grinnell College Museum of Art to see four colorful paintings by Iraqi American artist Vian Sora (b. 1976), on exhibit through April 8, 2023.

In 2022, the Grinnell College Museum of Art acquired these four works by Sora who was born in Baghdad, Iraq and now resides in Louisville, Kentucky. Her work explores the awesome power of natural forces—water in particular—as a backdrop for human experiences of trauma, displacement, and persistent hope of transcendence. 

Vian Sora in conversation with Contemporary Curator Tyler Blackwell

Utilizing a synthesis of styles and iconography taken from both her native, modern and ancient Iraq and adopted cultures, along with a variety of techniques, Vian Sora’s mixed media paintings embody imagery that suggests the struggle of the individual in the face of personal and social upheaval, often employing androgynous figures that transmute into expressionist abstraction. Her work also takes inspiration from such disparate modern masters as Chaïm Soutine, Willem de Kooning, and Gerhard Richter, whose Birkenau cycle paintings the artist viewed in Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie. Sora’s paintings reflect the zeitgeist of the city while also expanding her vibrantly expressive color palette and distinctive visual language. 

n 2006, less than six months after artist Vian Sora got married and moved to Istanbul, her uncle, Ammar al Saffar, then Deputy Health Minister in Iraq, was kidnapped from their family home in Baghdad and later killed. Terror invaded Sora’s life as she lost her uncle and her home, so she decided to move to Dubai with her husband. There, she filed a sharia refugee/humanitarian case for her family in the United Arab Emirates. In 2007, after many trials and tribulations, Sora re-settled her parents and siblings, but the financial crisis of 2008 quickly derailed their attempts at re-building a life. Determined to persevere and with few remaining options, Sora and her husband departed for his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.

At first glance, Vian Sora’s works look like cosmic implosions. Flat, organic forms act as viewfinders for boisterous textures that resemble bubbling, oozing acid; wet, dense cement; and hazy cosmic dust.  But Subduction, the artist’s first solo exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, does not speak of intergalactic or otherworldly realms. Rather, it pertains to the entropic and ever-changing geological processes of the earth.

From the Latin prefix, “sub-,” meaning under, the process of subduction occurs when two plates collide, causing one to thrust beneath the other before it is recycled into the earth’s mantle. Iraq, Sora’s native country, sits on a portion of the Arabian plate and forms part of a massive and complex zone of continental conflict. 

The capacity to reside in joy and terror in equal measure gives Sora’s paintings their unsettling power, a brutal acknowledgment that creation coexists with destruction

LOUISVILLE, KY — What You Shout Into the Woods Echoes Back, the title of a new show by Vian Sora, is the translation of a German proverb that means something like “What goes around comes around.” In a word, karma. Together, the 20 paintings on view feel heavy with the accumulation of history: karmic cycles of violence, pestilence, and death. (Sora, who was born in Baghdad, remained in the city through multiple wars, including the 2003 United States invasion, before emigrating.) And yet, the work also sings with the equally abiding presence of growth, rebirth, and new life. 

Louisville painter Vian Sora wrapped up time in Berlin. She's creating a new body of work based on themes that have shaped her life: bombings and displacement. That’s why she’s drawn to Berlin, a city with a history of destruction.

Louisville painter Vian Sora’s process is all about adding and subtracting. She first applies spray paint, acrylic or pigments to her canvas and, then, uses materials including Velcro and glass to strip color away. “I was trying to kind of create these interesting textures and then I'm going to go and strip again and then I'm going to apply color,” she said. Earlier that day, a sunny Friday in mid-August, Sora had swept up this debris from the floor of her temporary art studio located in an old, once-bombed-out building in the central Berlin neighborhood of Moabit. She doesn’t mind working amid the mess, but wanted to ensure we “didn’t have an accident here.”