viktoria nianiou
Viktoria (Lesbos, Greece, 1991) is a visual artist with a Fine Arts degree from the University of Granada. Her multidisciplinary practice—painting, drawing, sculpture, and ceramics—focuses on travel, landscape, and the exotic as creative drivers. She has developed projects in Spain, Greece, Peru, South Africa, and Italy, exploring the relationship between nature, culture, and myth. Her work constructs a unique visual alphabet where horses, swords, stars, suns, and other symbols intertwine in open compositions, inviting the viewer to explore universal tensions such as strength and vulnerability, freedom and dependence, harmony and struggle.
She recently lives and works in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Represented by The Paddocks gallery (GR)
¨My artistic practice is born out of travel, the search for the unknown, and a fascination with what we perceive as exotic. From my first works in the Peruvian rainforest to my residencies in South Africa, Italy, and my return to Lesbos, I realized that movement, observation, and encounters with other places and cultures are the driving forces of my creation.
I work in a multimodal way—painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics—aiming not only to record the appearance of the places I visit but also the emotions, tensions, and imaginations they evoke. I am interested in how the real and the symbolic coexist: the rainforest as a mythical place, Africa between the fantasy of safari and the reality of hunting, Sicily as a crossroads of species and stories, and Lesvos as a landscape that, after distance, appeared magical and exotic in my eyes.
In recent years, my work has focused on landscape and the construction of my own visual “alphabet.” I often begin with photographs—of travels, walks, sunsets—that serve as archive, trigger, or starting point. The sunset fascinates me not only for its visual beauty but also for its symbolic dimension: it is a universal moment of reflection, transition, and color that never repeats in the same way.
Certain elements recur in my work, functioning as symbols and protagonists: horses—strong and sensitive at once, symbols of power and freedom but also of vulnerability; alongside them, swords, stars, suns, moons, chains, castles, and palm trees. This repertoire of images intertwines in my paintings as an open language, where composition, scale, and the interaction of elements create possible stories.
I aim for these stories to never close completely, but to invite the viewer to find their own reading. From my perspective, they speak of fundamental tensions of life: calm and struggle, harmony and strength, love and independence, authority and fear, sensitivity and freedom. Ultimately, each work is a space of poetic resonance, where the personal and the universal meet.¨