Lina Iris Viktor: Some are Born to Endless Night – Dark Matter, Autograph gallery

Lina Iris Viktor's paintings are almost liminal surfaces. Looking at them you feel as though you are looking into another realm that runs parallel to our own, one populated by Viktor's own likeness. Many of her images are also teeming with patterns and flora, painted in lustrous black paint and shimmering 24 carat gold. It was these works that caught the eye of Marvel Studios, who reportedly asked to use Viktor's motifs to help promote their latest superhero movie. She declined, and in 2018 she took Kendrick Lamar to court when he allegedly used designs from her paintings in his music video All Stars on his Black Panther album.

With all that behind her, Viktor is concentrating on work. This September Autograph will present her first major solo UK exhibition, entitled Some Are Born To Endless Night — Dark Matter. The show will walk visitors through Viktor’s intoxicating world with more than 60 new and existing works, including a work commissioned by the gallery.


Left: Lina Iris Viktor, We are the Night — The Keepers of Light, 2015-9. Commissioned by Autograph. Courtesy the artist and Autograph, London. Right: Lina Iris Viktor, Third, from the series A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred, 2017-8. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery

For Viktor, black is ‘materia prima: the source, the dark matter that birthed everything.’ The images to go on show in this exhibition are influenced by European portraiture, ancient African motifs and Egyptian symbolism. At the show's centre, visitors will encounter Black Ark, a site-specific installation of latticed wooden panels, inspired by the nets of Liberian fisherman and the patterns of mashrabiyas, an intricate architectural feature common on Islamic buildings. And in this room the black tropical plants of Viktor’s paintings will be liberated from the canvas in sculptural form, giving visitors the sense of having walked into one of her paintings.

The second gallery will be painted ultramarine blue, another dominant colour in Viktor’s work. Ultramarine has a rich history in Egyptian and European art and is heavily symbolic of wealth and divinity. Born in London to Liberian parents and working from a studio in manhattan, Viktor certainly has a global outlook.Curator Renée Mussai says that Viktor’s work ‘centres the black figure as the universal human form through which narratives are weaved, histories entwined and possible futures imagined.’

This exhibition is being billed as an immersive experience, and it’s one that we’re very excited about.