Lina Iris Viktor - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York Wednesday, November 16, 2022 | Phillips

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  • Scintillating like a starry night, Lina Iris Viktor’s Constellations VI is an entrancing abstract composition mingling traditional media with luminous passages of 24 karat gold. With its gleaming patterns and lustrous intricacies, the painting feels like a monumental gem—a painterly jewel for the viewer to behold. Forming part of a series of seven eponymous paintings conceived between 2016 and 2018, Constellations VI and its sister works are reminiscent of poetic artistic compositions addressing the theme of celestial arrangements.

    "I want to create a visual language, or narrative, that unifies all these different symbols, and find a way to weave a visual tale that is not a literal language but that is felt far more intuitively."
    —Lina Iris Viktor
    In a resplendent field of gold high relief, Constellations VI renders a coded pattern of symbols that the artist refers to as “layers of light.” The meandering patterns– floral motifs, geometric webs and unfurling spirals–are inspired by West African textiles. In these, Viktor identifies “repetitive patterns of the universe” that also relate to the concept of creation, noting “even our DNA is a pattern-based, repetitive, cyclical thing.”Gold proves to be an ample material for expressing these divine connections, as Viktor draws upon its associations with ritual, alchemy and sanctity. Like Yves Klein and his monogold works before her, Viktor uses the formal luminosity and metaphoric weight of gold in a pursuit of the eternal. As Viktor is interested in the ‘otherworldliness’ of the metal, as well as the way it has been perceived across African, Southeast Asian, and South American cultures, she endows it with a spiritual value that is reminiscent of Klein’s gold divinations that explore the material’s mystical properties.

     

    Yves Klein, MG 23 Monogold sans titre, 1961, gold leaf on pannel, Private Collection. Image: © Scala, Florence. © Succession Yves Klein c/o ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021.
    Yves Klein, MG 23 Monogold sans titre, 1961, Private Collection. Artwork: © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

    Viktor draws upon trans-cultural and trans-temporal artistic traditions from African symbolism and cosmology, with influences spanning from the present-day Dogon people of Mali to ancient Egyptian and Roman mythology. Grounding her work with black, Viktor uses the tone for its physical and metaphoric presence, describing it as “the materia prima, from blackness was birthed the universe.”ii Balking against the conception that the black should represent absence or a deficiency, she instead argues it is a building block: “It is what gold and precious materials are mined from.” It is in the midst of obscurity and blackness, she adds, that “stars and planets are born.”iii The result of this comprehensive perspective is a transcendent work that combines the figurative with the abstract; mathematics with mysticism; rich, multivalent black tones with shimmering, luminescent hues of gold.


    Viktor was born in 1987 in the United Kingdom to Liberian parents. Having earned considerable praise following her debut solo show at Gallery 151, New York, in 2014, Viktor became the subject of her first institutional exhibition in 2018-19 with Lina Iris Viktor: A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred. at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Her work was more recently exhibited at the Southbank Centre, London in Summer 2022. The newly established LDGR has announced representation of the artist. The gallery's exhibition Rite of Passage, June to October 2022, presented Viktor's newest work with context from historic pieces by César, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson and Yves Klein.

     

    i Lina Iris Viktor, quoted in Tess Thackara, ”Everything This Young Artist Touches Turns To Gold,” Artsy, December 4, 2018, online.
    ii Lina Iris Viktor, quoted in Jennifer Copley, “This Liberian-British Painter is Fixing the Art World’s Historical Gaps Using 24K Gold,” Harper’s Bazaar, September 24, 2018, online.
    iii  Lina Iris Viktor, quoted in “Golden girl: the 24-karat wonders of Lina Iris Viktor,” The Guardian, October 11, 2017, online

    • Provenance

      Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Seattle
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

Property from an Important New York Collector

341

Constellations VI

pure 24 karat gold, acrylic and resin on matte canvas
84 x 60 in. (213.4 x 152.4 cm)
Executed in 2018, this work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$140,000 - 180,000 

Sold for $126,000

Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Day Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

New York Auction 16 November 2022