Trancerealism, the MONEY and WAR collections, a New York gala prize — and a dark universe where the paintings learned to speak. An artist who refuses to stay on the wall.
Victoria Unikel’s career in the art world began conventionally enough: paintings and mixed media, exhibited from 2008 onward, signed with her surname alone — UNIKEL. What was never conventional was the subject list. Money. War. Gender. New York. Diamonds. Five collections, five pillars of the modern mythology, each treated like a varnished Old Master: the interest is in what is still visible underneath the shine. The shine, in her reading, is the point of the exercise.
The method eventually required a name, and she supplied one herself — Trancerealism, a movement of her own founding, announced with the same directness as the collection titles. The establishment signed off in 2019, when Unikel took the top art prize at the MOSAIC Federation gala at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York. A room built for consensus spent an evening applauding a critique of its own walls.
The paintings learn to speak
The rest of her career has been an argument that a movement should not have to choose a medium. Unikel is a trained cellist and mezzo-soprano. Her goth-rock record Exorcist appeared in 2008 and still streams; her catalog has passed 200,000 albums, published through The Orchard and Sony. Canvas, score, page — the frame keeps changing. The signature does not.
Today the center of the work is Exorcista, a dark universe that behaves like a retrospective in permanent progress: a graphic-novel heroine at its center, a Grimoire Series of dark books, soundtracks she writes herself, and a screen of her own. The door to all of it is Exorcista. Scripts, scores, covers, canon — the universe is curated the way a gallery hangs a room: slowly, and on purpose.
The next opening night belongs to a book. On October 30, at 9 p.m. New York time, Unikel premieres Dark Fairytales: thirty episodes of read-aloud horror, fifteen to twenty-five minutes each, the old tales delivered back to their original register — frightening from the first minute, unsweetened by a century of adaptation. The scripts run past 112,000 words, close to nineteen hours of voiced material, written directly in English. Nothing translated, nothing softened. Rolling Stone has described them as
“fairytales the way they actually are. Without Disney endings.”
The book that refuses its title
The production’s key image is already an art object: a massive folio in matte dark leather, cream pages, thick enough to stop a knife — and, the detail everyone remembers, no title on the cover. In a season of logo mania, the most talked-about object of the Halloween premiere declines to say its name. The Dark Fairytales Spell Book, volume three of the Grimoire Series, arrives the same night the show premieres; the podcast feed opens a week earlier, on October 23, and a new episode lands every Friday after the premiere.
It is a long way from Cipriani to a firelit Cinderella with the ending left intact, and Unikel is the reason both rooms exist inside one career. Her own summary remains the shortest catalogue entry she has ever written:
“I build worlds that shouldn’t exist. Then I make them profitable.”
