LGDR is delighted to announce that the gallery is now working with Liberian-British multidisciplinary artist Lina Iris Viktor.

In London, Viktor’s work is on currently on view in the gallery’s exhibition Rite of Passage: Lina Iris Viktor with César, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, and Yves Klein through October 29, 2022, and in the group exhibition In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery through September 18, 2022.

Viktor’s first solo exhibition with LGDR will debut in Paris in 2023.

The artist currently lives and works between Naples and London. Her distinct visual language has achieved critical acclaim for its deft mingling of disparate materials and methods to activate diasporic histories and mythologies. Viktor’s work, which merges performance, painting, and sculpture, and photography, often incorporates water gilding with 24-karat gold, an ancient technique she has deployed over the past decade to embed ‘layers of light’ into the surfaces of her work, as displayed in the celestial effects of her ongoing Constellations series (2016–ongoing).

Viktor’s influences range from African symbolism found in both ancient Egypt and contemporary Mali, to classical astronomy and European portraiture. Her works involve philosophical commentary that addresses both the physical and spiritual realms, and an expansive approach to the use of black. Viktor’s lexicon employs color as a conduit: lustrous gold to summon spiritual transcendence harkening back to funerary traditions of antiquity; ultramarine in reference to South American, Indian, and North African aesthetics (as well as the “Blue Room” of her former studio); and black as an evocation of the limitlessness of being, of reclamation, and of universality—the “materia prima” and primordial source of life.