VIAN SORA: Sky from Below: March 7-May 3, 2025

David Nolan Gallery is delighted to announce Vian Sora: Sky from Below, our second solo exhibition with the Iraqi-American artist who is one of the strong new energetic and authentic voices of our time. Sky from Below will be on view from March 7 until May 3, 2025, in advance of her solo museum show opening in June 2025 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and traveling to the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, and the Asia Society Texas, Houston. This traveling museum tour is a culmination of Sora’s great success of the last decade.

Sora was born in Baghdad and currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky. The idea for the body of new work on view in Sky from Below began to percolate when the artist recently revisited the Middle East and flew over Iraq. After 18 years away, she still recognized traces of familiarity within the significantly changed landscape of her homeland. The title of the exhibition comes from memories of the artist’s childhood when she would look up at the sky, both innocently and because of the fighter planes that flew overhead. Sora poured the ensuing emotional chain reaction onto these canvases. The works approach the feeling of identity loss by creating an opposite world of lush environments and landscapes. The imagined, mythical landscapes and scenery represent an incessant dance between creating and annihilating, of adapting to new realities and multilayered existences. 

In June 2025, Sora’s first museum survey exhibition will open at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Vian Sora: Outerworlds will assemble approximately 20 of Sora’s major works, charting her growth as an artist over a period of seven years, 2016 to 2023. Outerworlds is Sora’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States and will tell the story of how her multivalent paintings abstractly channel the tumultuous events of her life, ancient Mesopotamian history, Western art history, and Iraq’s diverse natural landscapes, including its deserts, rivers, and archaeological sites. It will start at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA (June 22, 2025 - September 7, 2025), then travel to the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY (October 10, 2025 - January 18, 2026) and the Asia Society Texas, Houston, TX (April 2, 2026 - July 5, 2026).

The Purpose of Abstraction

By John Yau

It helps to understand Vian Sora’s abstract paintings when you realize she does not separate art from life: “I’ve been influenced by all the places I moved to, and in my landscapes you see there are no borders. Borders have messed up my life, so I try to break those borders in my work.”

Borders, which in some cases were restrictive barriers, have played a part throughout Sora’s life. The bordered landscapes that she has lived in include Baghdad, Iraq, where she was born into a Kurdish family in 1976; Istanbul, Turkey, where she studied printmaking at the Istanbul Museum of Graphic Art (IMOGA); London, where she met her husband, an American; Berlin, Germany, where she had a studio and worked because of a months’ long travel grant she received from the Great Meadows Foundation; and Louisville, Kentucky, where she and her family currently live. In all of these places, she was an outsider.

The second largest ethnic group in Iraq, the Kurds are a separate minority with its own culture, language, and identity. Not yet having been officially recognized as a nation, the Kurds exist in a country that has long marginalized them. After Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, came into power in 1979, being born into a Kurdish family in Baghdad meant you were under constant surveillance and always suspected of illegal activities.

In addition to growing up as member of a persecuted minority, Sora’s life was marked by violent upheaval, including the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), the Gulf War (1990-1991), the 2003 invasion of Iraq by America and its allies, and the ecological havoc wreaked by the wars. In his documentary film Lessons of Darkness (1992), with his camera moving between bird’s eye views and close-ups, Werner Herzog gazes at the Kuwait oil fires, the destruction of the landscape, miles of destroyed vehicles left behind by Hussein’s retreating army, torture chambers, and the effect the war had on a number of children, including one whose traumatic experiences made him unable to speak. All this happened before Iraq became the fifth most polluted country in the world (2024).

Purposefully not separating art from life, as previous generations of abstract artists had done, Sora breaks down borders and dissolves categories, including the fixity of the figure-ground relationship, and restrictions on subject matter, which, as a woman, she faced in Iraq, all while expressing the desire to move beyond her memories into a collective consciousness where the “I” is not central. At the same time, evidence of Sora’s defiance can be found everywhere in her work, beginning with its resistance to categories, such as whether her paintings are abstract or figurative. However, I feel there is a far larger context in which Sora’s defiance and border breaking meld together, and that is her repurposing of painting practices long thought to have become moribund.

Sora works both on the floor and on the wall. She begins by splashing, pouring, and spraying paint on canvases laid out on the floor, processes which had their origins in Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painting. Working in acrylic and oil, she lays down many layers, allowing pools of paint to bleed into each other, accumulate, and collide. This chaos is what she responds to when she begins to affix the canvas to the wall. In this two-step process, Sora brings chance and order together, but does not allow one to overwhelm or suppress the other.

This is where Sora’s imaginative genius comes to the forefront. She has reconfigured methods associated with Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting by making them capable of an expressiveness and receptivity that earlier generations did not consider important. Historically speaking, Clement Greenberg and other critics who championed Abstract Expressionism (particularly Jackson Pollock) and Color Field painting (Helen Frankenthaler) emphasized that paint was paint, and that art should only be about art. At the same time, Donald Judd took a radically different position in his famous essay, Specific Objects: “The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall.” While Judd and Greenberg held each other in contempt, both agreed that the artist’s hand was obsolete in the making of a painting.

Working in the aftermath of these aesthetic positions and methods, which had devolved into mannerisms, Sora did something unexpected. She breathed new possibilities into these modernist practices by making them receptive to a wide range of subjects that earlier, orthodox generations had banished from their work. She understood that what you don’t see is as important as what you do see, that making a purely optical painting essentially ignored the world. Further defining her position as a barrier breaker, Sora also rejected the widely agreed-upon postmodern practices of pastiche, parody, or citation. Sincerity has been one of the hallmarks of Sora’s practice since the beginning of her career. Irony has no place in her work.