Vian Sora: Outerworlds

abstract painting evoking a landscape with a bright palette including blues, greens, and purples

Vian Sora, Dilmun, 2022. Oil and mixed media on canvas. SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by the General Art Acquisition Fund © Vian Sora, 2022.

abstract work with blue and yellow color fields

Vian Sora, Echo and Narcissus, 2018. Mixed media finished w/ oil on canvas. Courtesy of Speed Art Museum.

abstract work on canvas with green, yellow, pink, and brown areas on a light blue background

Vian Sora, Outerworld I, 2021. Mixed media finished w/ oil on canvas. Collection of Brook and Pam Smith.

abstract work on canvas with spectrum of color fields

Vian Sora, Hanging Garden, 2022. Mixed media finished w/ oil on canvas. Courtesy of Vian Sora

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is pleased to announce Vian Sora: Outerworlds, a multi-venue mid-career survey of internationally renowned abstract painter Vian Sora (b. 1976, Baghdad). This exhibition will assemble approximately 20 of Sora’s major works, charting her growth as an artist over a period of seven years (2016–2023). This is her first solo museum show in the United States.

Growing up in Baghdad, Sora (b. 1976) lived through wars and conflict in Iraq and eventually immigrated to the United States, then brought her family to safety. She considers these paintings analogs to the experience of her life and Iraqi history. In them, gnashing forces convey experiences too big, too charged to be expressed directly. Their churning, relentless energy emulates the cycles of human history with its continuous cycles of peace, war, prosperity, and disaster, but also nature’s endless cycles of birth, growth, decline, death, and rebirth.

This exhibition is co-organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Asia Society Texas, and Speed Art Museum and is made possible in Santa Barbara through the generosity of SBMA Women's Board, Joan Davidson, Jeanne Dentzel, Great Meadows Foundation, Rachel Kaganoff, Isabel and Paul Wendt, and an anonymous donor.