Sophie Barber, Mouse House (2024)
Acrylic on paper
24 x 30cm (unframed)
Sophie Barber (b. 1996, Hastings, UK) is a painter who draws directly from the world around her, reproducing natural and manmade fragments in an attempt to preserve and process their forms. Depicting tents, bird hides and word games on monumental block-colour canvases, Barber creates surreal, folk-like compositions that are less depictions of her native Sussex coast than distillations of the impression it leaves. ‘Her paintings do not seek to definitively record a singular object or place’, writes critic Philomena Epps of Barber’s recent paintings, ‘they are not about Burwash, Hastings, Bexhill, but rather they elicit a frame of reference or mode of seeing that sets a kind of scene’.
Barber works in the nearby town of Hastings. Upon graduating from University of Brighton at Sussex Coast College Hastings in 2017, she was awarded the CVAN South East Platform Graduate Award, which is run in partnership between Aspex, De La Warr Pavilion, MK Gallery, Modern Art Oxford and Turner Contemporary. Speaking of Barber’s work at the time, Paul Hobson, Director of Modern Art Oxford, noted: ‘We were all struck by the coherence of Sophie’s painting practice and her already confident and distinctive artistic voice’. In the years since, Barber has continued to refine this voice through numerous solo and group exhibitions – from Goldsmiths CCA, London, to La Maison de Rendez-vous, Brussels – developing an ambitious and dynamic painterly practice that playfully toys with the possibilities of scale, reference and materiality. ‘Her mode of production is spontaneous and unfettered’, writes Epps: ‘representations are edited, distilled, or shown in isolation, with any figuration tending to drift into the realm of the fictional’.
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