Vian Sora’s Beautiful Wreckage

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.

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 traveled along trade routes until it reached the canvases of some of the greatest Italian Renaissance masters, including Giotto and Piero della Francesca. Here, it reappears in Sora’s paintings, resurfacing at different levels of their magmatic stratification.

Sora has always been fascinated by how Italian Renaissance painters worked with pigments as phenomenological and spiritual tools. It could have been any mineral, but human creativity instinctively used this intense blue as a vehicle for connecting to something beyond the terrestrial and the self. That moment reveals something profound about human beings and why art began in the first place: to elevate us from the ordinary level of existence toward something spiritual or transcendent. For Sora, painting functions as both an alchemical and a therapeutic process. “That’s partly why I think about painting almost like a laboratory—when all the ingredients are there, whether culturally, emotionally, or physically, something can emerge from that mixture,” she explains.

Sora’s paintings result from the accumulation and sedimentation of different moments in the encounter between matter and energy. Much like a volcano, a new layer might begin with an eruption, only to geologically settle and build over time through sedimentation and interaction with other elements. This is clearly visible in Scarlet (2026), a richly textured, energetic composition of warm gold, teal, red and black with dynamic splatters. The contrast of metallic tones and vibrant colors creates a visual intensity suggesting organic transformation or eruption. “There is always a kind of necessity behind it. The paintings often begin with an explosion, and then I start building over that moment with many layers,” she says.

At the outset, when she sketches them, many of the forms are actually figures—sometimes architectural fragments, sometimes calligraphic gestures. As she flattens them and begins applying pigments, the materials interact, gradually turning into something else. Importantly, the pigments Sora uses are not powders; they are mixed and liquefied, allowing them to plasmatically morph on the surface. “Before this show, I used a lot of spray paint because it allowed me to achieve something very quickly—something I was hungry to see,” she explains. “Now I’m able to reach a similar intensity without it, and I can hold on to that moment of action I’m looking for.”

There is also a study of the material itself—of how matter reacts to what one does with it. “That interaction, for me, is deeply physical. My body is interacting with the limits of what these paints can do,” she acknowledges. “It’s like a point of explosion that I’m trying to preserve. I’m not freezing it in time exactly, but there’s a tension, like a rope between you and the painting that always has to remain tight. If I lose that tension, I lose interest.”

At the beginning of the process, she says, it almost feels like swimming inside the painting. “What interests me is slowly revealing the subject through layering, but also through that active engagement with the surface. When you look at the paintings, it’s almost like entering a scene.” All of her works begin with an explosive moment, but when she starts introducing solid areas, oil paint and brush come into play—that is the moment of control. There are moments during the process that feel distinctly geological: layers forming, materials shifting as detritus of that eruption, sedimenting and solidifying.

“The process moves from a wide, explosive gesture toward containing it—toward control,” she says, acknowledging how this mirrors a movement from chaos toward form. Everything is in flux; there is always movement. That flux can feel almost psychedelic. “Sometimes I think about these paintings as if you are within air, within fire, under water, all at once. There’s always movement, but there’s no separation, only cyclical exchange and transformation.” At the same time, her visual language uses shapes that might suggest a script, a body or a face. In some forms, there is also something reminiscent of Arabic calligraphy, where letters can easily transform into shapes. “I’m very interested in that fluidity. It becomes almost musical—like improvisation, like free-styling.”

Sora is also trying to modernize the use of pigments, resisting the impulse to control them in the traditional sense. “Even the solid areas are built from layer upon layer upon layer.” This notion of sedimentation is key to understanding how Sora’s paintings embody a different temporality—both in their material fabric and in the experience we have of them. Within them, the personal and the universal collide, forming an interconnected and seemingly random constellation of relations. “This particular painting, for instance, parallels The Resurrection by Piero della Francesca,” she says, pointing to a work. “I was thinking about how that painting holds multiple temporalities within it. I’m very interested in process and technique, especially because I think about how these works will age. Eventually, they become artifacts.”

For Sora, this layering is also a way of mimicking history itself—the accumulation of traces left by ancient humans. Who was here first? Who came next? Every layer contains a fragment of that story. “I’ve seen some of my paintings from 25 years ago, and they’ve changed. If you were to X-ray a painting like this, you would see all the layers beneath the surface. It’s almost like breathing.” Her process also becomes a way of reflecting on what is happening in the world. “Change—war, but also peace—is inevitable in different parts of the world. History keeps moving, whether we want it to or not,” she reflects. Through painting, she tries to mimic that movement.

At the same time, the dense fabric of these works imposes a different sensorial experience on the viewer, unfolding only through excavation and unearthing. “I’m interested in slowing the viewer down. I don’t want to give a simple answer. I don’t want someone to stand in front of the painting for five minutes and feel they’ve understood it,” she says. “I want them to move back and forth, to return to it, and to discover different worlds each time.”

While deeply abstract, many of these scenes can also read like topographies—mirroring experiences of migration. “When I left Iraq, I moved through four different countries. The way you relate to a place changes as you arrive—you first encounter it as a kind of burden, something unfamiliar, and then gradually you begin to see the details,” she reflects. These unstable and constantly shifting topographies are tied to ideas of time zones and geography, which continuously reshape our sense of identity. “As people from the diaspora, we often feel suspended between places and times. The paintings become a conversation with the self, but also with a wider world.”

In some of her earlier works, Sora dealt more directly with the body’s transient nature, as something that inevitably passes through birth, growth and decay. “I’m often thinking about breaking the body—about tissue, about matter, and about how matter survives,” she says. “Sometimes the body decomposes and becomes something else, and then returns again.” While that process can seem grotesque to some, for her it is simply part of life. “As someone who grew up during war, I’m not afraid of confronting those realities,” she acknowledges.

One painting in the show feels particularly personal, originating from reflections following the recent passing of her father, just a week after her major exhibition opened at the Speed Museum. Only a few years earlier, he had received citizenship in the country where he had landed after a life marked by displacement, discrimination and atrocities, being both Iraqi and Kurdish. It felt like the closure of a circle. “My father’s death confronted me with that idea very directly,” she shares, as we stand before the largest work in the exhibition, a horizontal diptych she began the week he died.

Creating the piece “was a very tumultuous and violent process at first, but eventually it settled into something calmer—almost peaceful—like matter dissolving and transforming into something new,” she reflects. “That transformation became an important reference for the work.” Titled Tamarisk (Purification), it refers to a tree that grows in Iraq and parts of Saudi Arabia, which can retain water even in conditions where there is almost none—a symbol of resistance and resilience that proved sustaining to her father throughout his life. “I was thinking about perseverance and transformation, about resilience, but also about purification—how something turbulent can eventually settle, almost like closing a circle.”

In the painting, a darker mass—suggesting a reclining body or perhaps a truck—gradually fades and dissolves into abstract waves of flourishing gradients that surround it. The earthy brown brushstrokes evoke fragments of a body, but also branches and roots. In painting it, Sora was thinking about trees, burial in the ground and how trees develop complex underground systems of communication. “Beneath the surface, they form networks that almost resemble a neural system, a hidden structure through which they connect and exchange,” she explains. “For me, it’s also about understanding the unity between things—animals, birds, plants, humans. All of these fragments belong to the same ecosystem. Everything is connected.”

The most recent canvases in the exhibition seem to carry, within their celestial appearance, an awareness not only of terrestrial but also of interstellar connections and interdependence. In Celestial Capsule, vivid earthy tones dissolve into a nebulous explosion of shimmering particles, fragments and pure transformative energy. An evocation of the sublime, that feeling of awe and terror in the face of the universe’s greatest mysteries, it reveals how Sora’s abstractions are increasingly becoming vehicles for a vital awareness of cosmic entanglement and of the inevitability of destruction as a passage toward new life.

“I think of them as gestural fields,” Sora considers when asked how she would describe her approach to abstraction at this stage. “There is always an indication of a body, but also a way of communicating with things that I can’t necessarily see. In that sense, the work feels futuristic to me—because it challenges what people expect visually. I’m interested in breaking and recreating the image in a new way.”

Much of it, she acknowledges, emerges from the subconscious—both her own and something beyond her, for which she becomes a channel. “In the past, it felt like holding a huge ball of fire—I didn’t quite know what to do with it. Now it’s different. I feel like I’m in conversation with it, and there’s a clearer sense of where it might lead,” she says. “The more you work, the closer you get to your own vision—closer to what your life has imprinted on you. That’s how I think about these paintings: they are my life imprint. This is how it manifests.” Recent events have brought many memories back for Sora. “I remember the first night the bombings began,” she shares. “I went up to the roof of the house and saw the missiles crossing the sky. In some ways, the images we see today feel very similar to that moment.”

Yet the way Vian Sora approaches this in painting has changed. “I’m not trying to document the violence itself in my paintings. Instead, I’m trying to transform the memory—to translate it into something that can hold beauty as well as terror,” she explains. In this way, her paintings become not only a record but also an act of transformation. And in this way, she becomes a channel for articulating a deeper awareness of our time. This is an exhibition that feels uncannily timely, opening as it did as a new war broke out in the ancient region the artist comes from, bringing fresh destruction to a world in desperate need of exactly this kind of renewal.

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