VIAN SORA: End of Hostilities

David Nolan Gallery is delighted to announce Vian Sora: End of Hostilities, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York, on view from October 26 through December 9, 2023. The exhibition will include both paintings and works on paper, primarily made within the last twelve months, that demonstrate Sora’s unique vocabulary of gestural abstraction through her deft handling of form and singular application of color.

Sora initiates each work with a controlled chaos, covering surfaces in a barrage of fast-drying spray paint, acrylics, pigments and inks, using whatever is within arm’s reach — brushes, sponges, paper, nylons, spray bottles or even the force of her own breath — to create passages of intricate texture that might be described as delicate if not for the intensity of color they comprise. The associations they evoke range from the earthly (desiccated land, wood grain, animal pelt), to the celestial (gaseous cloud formations, swirling interstellar dust), to the biological and grotesque (networks of capillaries, fragments of bone).

Over this visual bewilderment, Sora carves out forms with exacting control, using a small flat brush to apply an opaque layer of paint, usually in two or three distinct and saturated hues, occasionally with a gradated effect. Through this process, a peculiar sort of optical trickery occurs as the opaque sections recede to the background and cause the textured base layer to be viewed as foreground elements.

Sora is highly intentional in the shapes she calls forth from the confusion, as in Verdict (2022): on the left side of the canvas, she creates the suggestion of a figure, perhaps a woman, with a pink face and golden garments; to the right, a more ominous form — a black crow, or maybe a raven — threatens to overtake the human figure in its exaggerated size. Abstract patches of pink and white and black swirl around them, as if whirling, subconscious hauntings, yet Sora is able to assert a sense of composure and assuredness with the soft curves of azure blue she carves into the textured background.

Many of Sora’s works take on the characteristics of landscapes, with clearly demarcated horizon lines, gradient skies and a profusion of bloom- and foliage-like shapes; in interviews, the Baghdad-born Sora has recalled with fondness the hours of her childhood spent among the roses and pomegranate shrubs of her grandmother’s garden in that ancient, fertile crescent. With her 2023 painting Eden, shapes are sharply defined and present more clearly as tropical foliage or a bird’s plumage, with textures that recall stars scattered across the cosmos. Still, Sora leaves plenty of room for am-biguity and darkness, as when joyful memories of home are tainted with the painful knowledge that one can never return there.