The artist’s new exhibition in New York expands the scale of disarmingly erratic paintings.
Vian Sora was hovering somewhere above the Persian Gulf last November. After the plane left behind Dubai en route to America, the painter eventually approached Iraq’s airspace, and a peculiar sensation settled. “This was the first time I had flown over my homeland eighteen years after leaving it,” she tells Elephant. The feeling was “triggering” while gliding from the south up north towards Baghdad. “I could recognize the choices of what is familiar then but so different right now.” The sea of emotions prompted Sky From Below, Sora’s current exhibition at David Nolan Gallery, New York.
Inside the winged metal vessel, the artist recalled her four-year old self who once looked up to the sky to see a fighter jet in 1980. The child, back then, was clueless about witnessing the start of the First Gulf War. But now, the 49-year old artist knew she “had to pour this chain reaction of feelings to the canvas.”
The show’s titular tour-de-force (2024-25) is a 191-cm by 228-cm boiling abstraction with wingspan-wide, rose-colored splashes, glittered, fire-like swirls, and a yellow explosion which is reminiscent of the sun. But the attribution of earthy phenomena to Sora’s motifs only decodes her enigmatic visual symphonies on the surface. The viewer’s fearless plunge into each concert of colour, form, and rhythm reveals innumerable other potentials beneath, personal for every pair of eyes.
For Sora, the past is an entwined moments of departures, decisions, and detours which include a computer science degree in Baghdad, learning to printmake in Istanbul, and settling on painting in her current city: Louisville, Kentucky. Over the years, abstraction has become something of a vehicle for her to merge the intangible—memories, griefs, and hopes—with the most evident, such as war, destruction, and resurgence. Sora’s insistently lush pictoriality roars against all forms of collapse caused by human vanity: “I use a hyperactive visual vocabulary and an imagination of nearly mythic landscapes to discern the lands that were inhabited but then destroyed, and then perhaps inhabited again.”
Corporality is at most extreme in her newest outing, as wild gestures and multicolour backgrounds hint at multitudes of the immigrant life. Sora pulls a physical chosen home and the motherland left behind together into alchemies of brutal realities and imagined potentials. Umm Al-Binni (2025) explodes with rays of speeding metal brushstrokes which pool into a purplish and orange haze; the backdrop holds rather more determined statements of blue, brown, and some green. Paths seem to converge and diverge in the blink of an eye.
Scale is a tool to encourage the viewer to face colours and their narrative chemistries. “I am trying to have a confrontational moment with what you expect to see in a gallery space,” adds Sora about her “immersive” size paintings. Above Two Rivers (2024-25) is the show’s largest, with an almost kinetic achievement on canvas, like rivers flowing or memories rolling. A floral effect stems from the spring shades of green, blue, and yellow, each made lighter or bolder across various corners of the surface. Soran seems to pause something otherwise mercurial for the very second in which our eyes turn to the painting. “You can be repelled or grabbed by these colours,” she believes. The tug-of-war echoes the in-betweenness of constructed realities: time zones, nationalities, and even careers.
Abstraction helps Sora veil the brutality of life with hints of beauty. There is a Guernica-like intention in her orchestration, in which charm is an allure and the stories behind it sound alarming. In the optic delirium of a dance challenge followed by a bomb attack on TikTok feeds, the artist’s beautiful chaos embodies the odd feeling of looking today. “We wake up in the morning inundated by hundreds of images about what is going on in the world, and all of that is there in the paintings.”
Sora’s near future is as bright as her bold colour palette. In May, she starts the six-week Civitella Ranieri artist residency in Umbria, which she plans to use to experiment with three-dimensionality. The artist will also enjoy the time off granted by the residency to “dive inward” and learn more about what she can achieve outside her comfort zone. The access to the Vatican Library is also a highlight she’s looking forward to. Later in the summer, Sora will step into perhaps her career’s most institutionally active period, with her solo show, Outerworlds, opening at Santa Barbara Museum of Art in June. The twenty-painting show will then stop at Speed Art Museum in October, and bow at Houston’s Asia Society Texas next April. “Imagine swimming in a river and almost touching the ground with your feet,” Sora says about the feeling of precarious emotionality that she’s after in her paintings. “And suddenly you are pushed away by a wave seconds away from the riverbed.”
Written by Osman Can Yerebakan
