Vian Sora’s Beautiful Wreckage |
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Vian Sora’s Beautiful Wreckage
The Iraqi-born painter transforms memories of displacement and destruction into richly layered meditations on survival and renewal.
Vian Sora’s paintings are an alchemical explosion, where paint collides, expands and organically transforms, coagulating and sedimenting into new forms. They are a cathartic exercise: an embrace of the chaotic nature of a universe driven by entropy, a visual acceptance of how everything is composed of particles in constant transformation. Sora’s practice is about surrendering, becoming a channel that moves through destruction toward evolution and regeneration. Born in Baghdad and later migrating to the United States after several displacements along the way, Sora witnessed the destruction of bombs firsthand. In the explosive nature of these pools of kaleidoscopically fluid pigment—pure color that bursts across the canvas and sediments into richly textured surfaces—one can sense her memories reverberating. Yet the energetic concentration in her work reveals how, even within violence and destruction, there are the seeds of something profoundly transformative and regenerative: a reclaiming of the potential to reactivate inert matter into endlessly new and lively forms.
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The references to war are still present, but they emerge as explosive emotions, almost cathartic—like a fire that must pass through destruction. “It’s like breaking the body apart and then putting it back together again,” Sora says, walking through her latest exhibition at Bortolami in New York. “One of the things that traumatized me the most when I was in Iraq, before I left, was witnessing explosions.” The experience profoundly altered the way she sees the world and everything unfolding around her. “In 2015, I woke up painting differently. I was finally able to confront physically what had happened. I wasn’t afraid anymore to use my voice,” she recalls, noting that this was the moment when the idea of using her body in painting truly emerged. “The emotion of the body becomes the first point of contact with the canvas, the initial impact. The marks follow that movement; they trace it.”
While her works might appear the result of a mostly improvisational rapture of physical movement on canvas, her latest show at Bortolami reveals a practice situated within a deeper dialogue with art history that goes well beyond the more direct legacy of American Abstract Expressionism that the gesturality of her work might suggest. Her abstractions unfold as a reflection on the evolution of painting itself, as well as on the materials used across geographies and centuries in this alchemical exercise that allows artists to tap into transcendental and cosmic dimensions.
A painting at the entrance, Streams of Lazouli, represents one of the first results of these reflections. A year ago, Sora was in residence in Umbria, Italy, where she encountered in person the painting that had long lived in her imagination: Piero della Francesca’s The Resurrection. Her first encounter with that painting was in a book given to her as a child by a British officer while she was bedridden after a serious car accident. “He told me, ‘One day you should go see that painting.’ It was a completely random gesture, but the idea of a painting and a book intervening like that stayed with me. That’s why I talk about origin not as something that explains everything, but as a background, a foundation.”
The exhibition takes its title from Tepe Gawra, an ancient Mesopotamian settlement in present-day Iraq, where some of the earliest objects adorned with lapis lazuli—dating to 4900-4000 BCE—were discovered. It establishes a direct link to the long history of this symbolically and alchemically powerful ultramarine color, used across cultures and latitudes as a conduit to the spiritual and the transcendental. Mined in ancient Mesopotamia, lapis lazuli........