The 2023 edition of the fair offers the best in contemporary art in specific sectors.  Art & Object has selected 10 works by artists, who we think are worth following and collecting.

An Iraqi-American artist who was born in Baghdad and is based in Louisville, Kentucky, Vian Sora makes large-scale abstract paintings that deal with themes of war, political upheaval, migration, and geographic and cultural displacement.

When one tries to make sense of the vivid hues in Iraqi artist Vian Sora’s paintings, the word “chaordic” comes to mind. Inspired by historical, environmental and psychological landscapes, Sora’s works reflect order in a chaotic yet opulent world.

‘Abzu’- Sora’s monumental painting exhibited by the Los Angeles gallery, Luis De Jesus, at this Art Basel Miami Beach show, is yet another statement of resistance. Informed by her personal experience and global perspective of life in the Middle East and abroad, Sora uses water to symbolise flux, resilience, and rebirth amongst shifting attributes—exposing human necessity and vulnerability.

A colorful abstract painting by the Iraqi-American artist Vian Sora has recently entered the collection of the 1914-founded Baltimore Museum of Art, in Maryland, in the US. Sora's painting, "Last Sound," was part of a museum initiative to diversify its collection by acquiring more than 100 multicultural objects. 

DUBAI: March 2023 will mark the 20th anniversary of US-led invasion of Iraq, which led to destruction, displacement, and prolonged political instability. One of the millions who witnessed the chaos unfold is the Iraqi-American painter Vian Sora. “There is nothing that I don’t remember,” she says from her atelier in Louisville, Kentucky. 

Born and raised in Baghdad, Vian Sora witnessed multiple wars in Iraq firsthand, suffering personal loss while sharing in the collective loss of her country. From a young age, she used art as an outlet to work through the trauma of conflict and displacement.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles began The Armory Show with a bang. With a compelling booth of newly created paintings by artists June Edmonds, Evita Tezeno, Vian Sora, Laura Krifka, and Nicolas Grenier, the gallery appeared to have one of the most visited booths at the fair. Within minutes of the opening, the gallery had sold work by Sora, Edmonds, and Tezeno. A gallery representative noted that sales were going strong by mid-day Thursday, with multiple pieces going to prominent collections in Malaysia, Texas, and Pittsburgh, plus institutional queries lined up for that evening. 

At first glance, Vian Sora’s works look like cosmic implosions. Flat, organic forms act as viewfinders for boisterous textures that resemble bubbling, oozing acid; wet, dense cement; and hazy cosmic dust. But Subduction, the artist’s first solo exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, does not speak of intergalactic or otherworldly realms. Rather, it pertains to the entropic and ever-changing geological processes of the earth.

The topics addressed in Vian’s work and practice are deeply personal to her history but at the same time universal in how they relate to what we as humans have faced in our world historically and today. The impact of loss and grief and rebirth, honoring those lost, and calling attention to the way we navigate violence, are present in her work in a way that can resonate with so many. For the artist conducting this interview, talking with Vian was an enriching experience that, like her work, was filled with tonally heavy topics, but always with growth, healing, and hope present.

From examining the primal nature of water to engaging mythology, animism, and Indigenous tradition and to speculating on new horizons, Andrea Carlson (Chicago, IL), Carolina Caycedo (Los Angeles, CA), Paul Maheke (England), Josèfa Ntjam (France), Claudia Peña Salinas (Brooklyn, NY), and Vian Sora (Louisville, KY) focus on the ways in which water is both a site of mourning and renewal.

One artist who will show preexisting work is Vian Sora, who was born in Baghdad but now lives in Louisville. Her paintings convey a fluid-like sense of motion between the figurative and the abstract. She’ll be presenting seven pieces, including the new painting River Bed, a response to last year’s deadly Kentucky tornadoes. “If you look at that painting, there are deflated bodies resting over branches,” Sora says. “I don’t want to say it’s about climate change, but it’s definitely a reaction to that.”

In a word, karma. Together, the 20 paintings on view feel heavy with the accumulation of history: karmic cycles of violence, pestilence, and death. (Sora, who was born in Baghdad, remained in the city through multiple wars, including the 2003 United States invasion, before emigrating.) And yet, the work also sings with the equally abiding presence of growth, rebirth, and new life. 

“For years, I was just trying to turn my back to a little bit of the intensity of the experience of not only being an immigrant, but being an Iraq immigrant in America, but also being an American,” Sora said. “And I feel like I was really faced with that here, not in a bad way.” 

In another corner, works focus on citizenship through the individual experience: Cuban native José Manuel Nápoles’s portrait of his fiance expresses a childlike exuberance that belies the agonizing displacement of emigration, while Iraqi-American Vian Sora paints silhouettes of human heads, their faces obscured in crimson fissures resembling desiccated deserts and violent blood splatters.

The work is undeniably chaotic, struggling to contain the exploded forms of color and texture and memory in a surge of energy and heat. And yet it also holds a persistent beauty, lines of elegance and grace that cut through the debris and roughness in lucid and reassuring curves. What is left is both a hope and a hollowness: streets clear of foreign tanks, skies absent of fighter jets, the silent stillness of a bombed-out city, this vast and sudden absence, this aching emptiness. 

Stare long enough and you will find things hidden in the paintings — a moon here, a figure there, or maybe even a few things that aren’t really anything at all, like what you see when you name the shapes of clouds. Sora thinks of the work not as being about her experiences, but being driven by them. For her, that explosive section of a painting could be reminiscent of a car bomb, though a viewer might never make that connection. One wonders if abstraction becomes a kind of armor in her work, a way of confronting past trauma without being overwhelmed by discernible representations of it.

In painter Vian Sora’s latest solo show, she illustrates a similarity between Berlin, Germany and Baghdad, Iraq. During a residency in Berlin last year, she had the chance to learn about the city’s rebirth after World War II. “As an Iraqi born artist,” she said, “my first-hand experience of war, political upheaval, migration and subsequent geographic and cultural displacement has deeply affected my life and my art. Since leaving Iraq, my works expressively address these issues.”

Artists’ creations can be inspired by many different experiences. Traveling to a foreign city, meeting a new person, undergoing illness or even facing political upheaval can provide ideas for new work. For Iraqi-American artist Vian Sora, inspiration comes from a mixed palette of life experiences. She was born and raised in Baghdad and grew up with certain expectations as the oldest daughter and granddaughter of a Middle Eastern family. 

“It’s not a direct response to any one political or military event in Iraq,” said Abrams. “It is inspired by the experiences of Vian Sora, a person from Iraq who has come to the United States and made her home here as a visual artist. It’s a piece that takes the totality of now well over a decade-and-a-half of our shared experience — both Americans and people abroad — as we try to absorb this world history.”

There is an unexpected delicacy to Vian Sora’s exhibit Displaced Narratives (1619 Flux:Art + Activism). The Iraqi-born artist approaches the difficult subject of displacement with a thoughtfulness that makes her art accessible. There is also timelessness to this collection; found in the use of ancient Mesopotamian technique of engraving the canvas, the reference to ancient iconography, the use of gold thus referencing byzantine art, the more modern floating and abstracted figures and compositions, and the contemporary color pallet, which are combined beautifully to create a transcendent visual experience.