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.”
