Artists

Lina Iris Viktor is a Liberian-British multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation. Known for her signature use of 24-karat gold against richly layered black surfaces, Viktor fuses ancient and contemporary visual languages to create an idiosyncratic cosmology that traverses history, myth, and futurity. Her labyrinthine compositions weave together abstraction and figuration, invoking West African sculptural traditions, ancient Egyptian iconography, classical astronomy, European portraiture, and diasporic cosmologies.

Gold, black marble, volcanic rock, and other materials drawn from the earth serve as metaphors for eternity, transformation, and the primordial. Within Viktor’s work, black—as both matter and color—becomes materia prima, the origin of life and a challenge to sociopolitical preconceptions of “blackness.” Her highly charged materiality engages philosophical questions of the finite and infinite, microcosm and macrocosm, mortal and divine.

Viktor studied film at Sarah Lawrence College (BA) and photography at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She has presented solo exhibitions at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (2024); Pilar Corrias, London (2024); Fotografiska, Stockholm & Tallinn (2020); Autograph, London (2019); and the New Orleans Museum of Art (2018). Group exhibitions include the Hayward Gallery, London (2022); Somerset House, London (2019); Ford Foundation, New York (2019); North Carolina Museum of Art (2020); and Harvard University’s Cooper Gallery (2016).

Her work resides in major public collections including the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (Washington, DC), Hessel Museum of Art (Annandale-on-Hudson), North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh), Spelman College Museum of Fine Art (Atlanta), and the Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento).