Sofya Shpurova is an artist from Russia, lives and works in Moscow and New York, where she is studying painting at Columbia University. Received her BA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2019). Sophia’s personal exhibitions were held in Moscow and Manchester (“Wounded Eyes”, scene gallery/szena, 2022, “Low Human Activity”, Holden Gallery, 2019). Participated in group exhibitions in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Basel and New York (“Vegetables and Death”, Troy Town, London, 2019, “No Time Like the Present”, Public Gallery, London, 2020, “Le Grand Show” , Glassbox, Paris, 2023).

Sofia Shpurova is a multidisciplinary artist who works primarily with painting. By exploring the surface of the canvas as skin, she attempts to achieve philosophical mobility while rejecting the traditional concept of personal mythology. She studies painting as a language in which meaning-making and the author’s imagination intertwine and evolve, creating new spaces of expression and interpretation. The subjects of Shpurova’s paintings exist in the space she has constructed between violence and fragility, fear and humor, detachment and attraction.

Through the author’s complex work with the surface of the canvas, which becomes a method of transforming it into a semblance of skin, a living organ, Sophia conveys the unsteady surface of a mentally meaningful event: the membrane of self-reflection. She uses the figurative system of Western European painting, but critically comprehends its iconography, where the physical phenomenon of painting serves the image. In her works, the surface of the canvas and the narrative of the work create a symbiotic being of the painting.

Shpurova again and again reproduces her face and body in her series, while demonstrating a lack of interest in portraiture as such. For her, it is important to change the contextual framework of the work through immersion in the world of imagination, dreams, fears and feelings. Sophia endlessly repeats, deforms and defragments her own image, ultimately ending in total detachment and depersonalization: this image becomes both a symbol of man and the Anthropocene and a symbol of something else, constantly escaping our understanding and going beyond the usual perception of reality.