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Lina Iris Viktor, Salt of the Earth, 2024

£15,000*

Bronze and scarva white earthenware clay with metallic glaze details

21 x 21 x 60 cm

Edition of 10 with signed certificate

*The price of the edition will increase as it sells out

Lina Iris Viktor's edition Salt of the Earth (2024) is an homage to modernist African architecture and traditional African craftsmanship. By weaving together raw materials such as clay and bronze, Viktor nods to the rich tradition of West African pottery-making and celebrates sacred diviners and relics that appear throughout her work in the form of vessels and sculptural objects. Taking off from her Constellations painting series, the gourd-shaped vessel is inlaid with golden symbols, runes, stars, and spirals, along with complex surface reliefs and beading. The interplay between golden symbols and beading synthesises the past and present of Viktor’s oeuvre and visual language, linking her exploration of symbology with the evolution of traditional forms. Inspired by a new series of sculptures that Viktor refers to as “Soul Vessels,” the bronze pedestal references and fuses together the geometric abstraction of modernist African architecture and traditional seating forms found across Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania.

Inaugurated in 1991, ICA Artists' Editions are special productions made for the Institute of Contemporary Arts by some of the most interesting artists working today. All proceeds from the sales of these works directly support our future events, exhibitions and learning programme.

About the artist

Lina Iris Viktor is a Liberian-British multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Italy.

Interweaving disparate materials, methods and visual lexicons associated with contemporary and ancient art forms, Viktor authors an idiosyncratic mythology that threads through deep time, knitting together a diasporic past with an expansive present in order to divine future imaginaries.

The artist’s practice is equally informed by her background in film, preceded by an early education in performance arts. Her synthesis of painting, sculpture, performance, photography and water-gilding with 24-carat gold produces a charged materiality that at once addresses philosophical ideas of the finite and the infinite, the microcosm and macrocosm, evanescence and eternity. In her recent sculptures and paintings, the use of materials once embedded deep within the earth – gold, black marble and volcanic rock – establishes a timelessness both intimate and intangible.

Within Viktor’s cosmology, black as matter and as colour plays the lead role of materia prima or the primordial source of life, a provocation and a challenge to the sociopolitical and historical preconceptions surrounding ‘blackness’ and its universal implications.

The artist’s interest in architecture, the materiality of objects and how they inhabit space informs many of the installations she envisions and builds.With an archaeological aesthetic impulse, and influences spanning West African sculptural traditions, ancient Egyptian iconography, classical astronomy and European portraiture, Viktor’s practice traverses mortal and divine realms.

Lina Iris Viktor received her BA in film at Sarah Lawrence College and studied photography as continuing education at The School of Visual Arts, in New York. Her work has been the subject of exhibitions at the Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (2024); Fotografiska Museum of Photography, Stockholm & Tallinn (2020); Autograph, London (2019); and New Orleans Museum of Art (2018), among others. She has been included in group exhibitions at institutions including the Hayward Gallery, London (2022); North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (2020); Somerset House, London (2019); Ford Foundation, New York (2019); Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento (2018); Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville (2016); Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta (2016); and Cooper Gallery, Harvard University, Cambridge (2016). Her work resides in collections such as the 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 Crocker Museum of Fine Art, Sacramento.

Important information for buyers

Pricing
As is traditional in editions publishing, prices will rise as an edition starts to sell out. 

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Care Instructions
For bronze and ceramic cleaning: Dust and wipe gently with a microfibre cloth.

For bronze protection: Apply one to two thin coats of renaissance wax with light pressure to the bronze surface with a microfibre cloth, avoid dragging the wax off the surface. Lightly buff out with a microfibre cloth to a full shine.