NEW YORK, NY.- Bortolami Gallery announced the representation of acclaimed painter Vian Sora (b. 1976, Baghdad, Iraq; lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky, USA). Concurrent with her traveling museum retrospective, titled Outerworlds, Sora will have a solo exhibition at Bortolami this coming March following upcoming group presentations with the gallery this October at Art Basel Paris and November in Tribeca. Bortolami will represent Sora’s work globally in collaboration with The Third Line, Dubai, UAE.
Sora is best known for vivid, improvisational abstractions which reflect on themes of creation and regeneration. Her compositions balance disorder with control, evoking the terrain of an aerial landscape or the bloom of flora. Working from above with her canvases laid flat, Sora dissolves raw pigments into rich, aqueous color fields. By applying dozens of layers of paint, Sora achieves a tremendous range of surfaces, from dense, crystalline textures to airy, atmospheric passages. Her expressionistic grounds are overlaid with a series of crisp, monochrome shapes, rendered freehand by the artist. They resemble elements of Arabic calligraphy and cuneiform which have been fragmented into the artist's own formal, non-representational language.
These compositional tensions are informed by Sora’s experiences as an immigrant and survivor of war. Born to Kurdish and Iraqi parents, Sora witnessed political violence which resulted in the persecution, torture and assassination of different family members during the tumult of Saddam Hussein’s regime and its aftermath. Sora herself survived gunfire while working as a journalist for the Associated Press during the Iraq war.
Suzanne Hudson writes in Sora’s forthcoming monograph: “These paintings model dissolution and reconstitution. Sora builds them from the ground up from the ground, with layers creating meaning in their overlap and disambiguation. The results as images are undecidedly terrestrial or biomorphic, often harboring content that feels both tangible and out of reach.”
Sora sought refuge in Dubai before emigrating to the United States and settling in a community of fellow Iraqi expats in Louisville, Kentucky. A self taught painter, Sora has received increased recognition and exposure in recent years from a series of exhibitions and museum acquisitions in the U.S. and Middle East. Her retrospective, Outerworlds, has just concluded at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, an exhibition curated by James Glisson. The retrospective will next travel to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky and open October 9. This edition will be curated by Tyler Blackwell. The exhibition will continue to Asia Society Texas in Houston in April of 2026, curated by Owen Duffy.
Sora has exhibited her works internationally at Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, UAE; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, USA; IMOGA Istanbul Museum of Graphic Art, Istanbul, Turkey; the KMAC Triennial, Louisville, USA; Grinnell Museum of Art, Grinnell, Iowa, USA and many other venues. Works by Sora are included in the permanent collections of the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, USA; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, USA; Dar El Cid Museum, Kuwait City, Kuwait; KMAC Museum, Louisville, USA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, USA; the Shands Collection, Louisville, KY; Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell, IA; Ministry of Culture Contemporary Collection, Baghdad, Iraq; the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio, USA; and the Shah Garg Foundation, USA, among others.
Vian Sora’s retrospective, Outerworlds, will be on view 10 October, 2025 – 18 January, 2026 at the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, US.
An accompanying monograph will be published in November, designed by Info and Updates with essays by Asia Society Texas curator Owen Duffy, art historian Suzanne Hudson and an interview with Speed Art Museum curator Tyler Blackwell.
Published by Inventory Press, Speed Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, & Asia Society Texas.
