[ENG] Lina Iris Viktor: Black & Gold

Lina Iris Viktor is a conceptual artist, performance artist, and painter.  She lives and works itinerantly between New York and London.   Raised in London to Liberian parents, she travelled extensively in her youth also living in Johannesburg, South Africa for many years. The multi-disciplinary approach to her work, which weaves disparate materials and methods belonging both to contemporary and ancient art forms calls into question the nature of time and being.   Viktor creates her own mythology, her works are a merging of photography, performance, abstract painting, along with the ancient practice of gilding with 24-karat gold to create increasingly dark canvases embedded with “layers of light” in the form of symbols and intricate patterns. Each provoke a philosophical commentary through material that at once addresses the infinite and the finite, immortality and mortality, the microcosm and macrocosm, in addition to the socio-political and historical preconceptions surrounding ‘blackness’ and its universal implications.   Viktor has exhibited at The Ford Foundation, New York; Somerset House, London; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; Harvard Art Museums and The Cooper Gallery, Harvard University, Boston; and Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Spelman College, Georgia, among other institutions.