Sophie Barber

Sophie Barber is a painter who captures the world around her on canvas. She reproduces natural and manmade elements to preserve and understand their forms.

Biography of Sophie Barber

The artist was born in 1996 in Hastings, UK. In 2017, she received a BA in Fine Art from the University of Brighton, Sussex Coast College. After graduation, she was awarded the CVAN South East Platform Graduate Award.

Since then, Barber has continued to develop her artistic style through numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her solo shows include "They don’t make ‘em like they used to" at Chris Sharp Gallery in Los Angeles (2024), "How Much Love Can a Love Bird Love, Can a Love Bird Love a Love Bird" at Alison Jacques in London (2021), "Kim and Kanye kiss without tongues" at Chris Sharp Gallery in Los Angeles (2021), and "The Greatest Song a Songbird Ever Sung" at Goldsmiths CCA in London (2018). 

Additionally, her works have been featured in numerous group exhibitions held at various venues worldwide, including Castor Gallery in London, Timothy Taylor in New York, Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, Xenia Creative Retreat in North Hampshire, Venus Over Manhattan in New York, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims, among others. 

Currently, Sophie Barber lives and works in her hometown. 

Sophie Barber's Famous Paintings

Barber's monumental block-color canvases depict tents, bird hides, and word games in surreal, folk-like compositions. These works aren't literal representations of the Sussex coast but distillations of its impression on her.

Notable pieces include "Franz dies a sculptor" (2020), "Kim and Kanye by Juergen again" (2021), "Donald baechler loves his flowers" (2022), "Michael Clark" (2022),  "Joan’s sunflowers" (2023), and many more.

Sophie Barber's Art Style

Barber's paintings are collections of elements from her immediate surroundings. Her fascination with spaces of concealment is evident in her broader artistic process. She works with thick layers of oil paint, each one obscuring the marks beneath it. She also deconstructs her images, redistributing their elements in a manner that hides their original form.

Barber's interest in the weight of things, including heaviness and collapse, reflects both the material qualities of her work and her approach to image-making. Her unstretched canvases often crease and slump, resembling oversized clothes draped over shoulders. This sense of collapse extends to her artistic process, where she deconstructs the images she paints. This playful reduction is particularly evident in her miniature works, created on tightly-wrapped offcuts of recycled canvas.

On the irregular surfaces of these impastoed objects, Barber portrays the sculptural forms of prominent male figures such as Giotto, Barry Flanagan, and most frequently, Franz West. Their grand public sculptures are humorously transformed into squiggles and deliberately haphazard marks. Barber replicates these forms because, much like the tents featured in her larger canvases, they have made such a significant impression on her that she feels compelled to reimagine them.