Biography

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’.

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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’.

Barber’s paintings exist as aggregations of her immediate surroundings. In her recent solo exhibition at Goldsmiths CCA, ‘The Greatest Song a Songbird Ever Sung’, three monumental canvases combined textual fragments and references to the Sussex coastline with various depictions of shelters: bird hides and dens, heavy tarpaulin tents that corresponded with the unstretched material on which they were rendered. ‘I’m interested in things you can hide in’, says Barber, and this interest in spaces of concealment carries into her broader process: not only does she work with heavy layers of oil, each of which obscures the marks that came before, she also deconstructs the images that she paints, redistributing their components in a manner that obscures their original form. While the 2018 work Puffin at Pett Level does not explicitly depict the titular bird, its colouring is preserved in the red of a tent, a deep black background and the yellow edge of a moon. In Canary Club (2019), the implied yellow of the title is squeezed into a pyramid-like shelter.

‘I’m interested in the weight of things’, Barber has noted, ‘heaviness and things collapsing’. This is an allusion to both the material qualities of her work, the way in which her unstretched canvases crease and slump like oversized clothes on shoulders, and the manner in which she collapses the very images she paints. Rarely is this process of playful reduction as evident as in the miniature works that Barber paints on tightly-wrapped offcuts of recycled canvas. (Barber operates at the extremes of scale; the middle, that which is easily controlled, is uninteresting.) On the irregular surfaces of these impastoed objects, Barber depicts the sculptural forms of such celebrated male gatekeepers as Giotto, Barry Flanagan and, most frequently, Franz West, their monumental public sculptures humorously reduced to squiggles and intentionally slipshod marks. (Flanagan is simply referred to as ‘Barry’; his iconic hare sculptures distilled to splotches of blue.)

These forms are replicated because, as with the tents that populate her larger canvases (‘structures that move with the weather and the world’), they have left such an impression on Barber that she feels compelled to do so. As is illustrated in a recent series of miniatures, onto which she has playfully reproduced the covers of ArtReview magazines that were strewn around her studio, this is repetition as an attempt to resolve, working over as a means to work out why certain forms stick with us. In this, Barber’s is a slow game of processing images: of replicating, reconfiguring and reconsidering visually arresting forms until they reveal themselves to be something other than they were before – or collapse completely, like the pink spirals of a Franz West sculpture or the heavy walls of a circus tent.

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Works

Joan’s sunflowers, 2023

Oil on canvas
24 x 38.5 x 6.5 cm (9 1/2 x 15 1/8 x 2 1/2 in)
Courtesy: © Sophie Barber

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Franz dies a sculptor, 2020

Oil on canvas
4.4 x 6.5 x 2.5 cm (1 3/4 x 2 1/2 x 1 in)
Courtesy: © Sophie Barber

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Michael Clark, 2022

Oil on canvas
8.5 x 10.3 x 4.5 cm (3 3/8 x 4 1/8 x 1 3/4 in)
Courtesy: © Sophie Barber; photo: Michael Brzezinski

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David loves his dachund to death, 2022

Oil on canvas
200 x 180 cm (78 3/4 x 70 7/8 in)
Courtesy: © Sophie Barber

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Birds Sing at Chapel, 2020

Oil on canvas
395 x 297 cm (155 1/2 x 116 7/8 in)
Courtesy: © Sophie Barber

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Franz at Pett Level, 2020

Oil on canvas
3 x 4.5 x 4.2 cm (1 1/8 x 1 3/4 x 1 5/8 in)
Courtesy: © Sophie Barber

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2 Tables die Askulptur, 2020

Oil on canvas
20 x 25 x 7 cm (7 7/8 x 9 7/8 x 2 3/4 in)
© Sophie Barber

Alex Katz paints Claude’s lilies, 2022

Oil on canvas
15.5 x 24 x 3 cm (6 1/8 x 9 1/2 x 1 1/8 in)
Courtesy: © Sophie Barber

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Edvard Munch loves his dogs so much, 2022

Oil on canvas
19 x 22.8 x 7 cm (7 1/2 x 9 x 2 3/4 in)
Courtesy: © Sophie Barber

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Hiding at Hythe, 2020

Oil on canvas
559 x 398 cm (220 1/8 x 156 3/4 in)
Courtesy: © Sophie Barber

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The Osaka frog, 2024

Oil on canvas
27 x 37 x 10 cm (10 5/8 x 14 5/8 x 4 in)
Courtesy: © Sophie Barber

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Wolfgang and i wish you were here, 2024

Oil on canvas
218 x 156 cm (85 7/8 x 61 3/8 in)
Courtesy: © Sophie Barber

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Renoirs flower to tell me he loves me, 2024

Oil on canvas
37.5 x 51 x 9.5 cm (14 3/4 x 20 1/8 x 3 3/4 in)
Courtesy: © Sophie Barber

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The mouse who was to marry the sun (Nezumi no Sumō), 2024

Oil on canvas
47 x 64 x 9 cm (18 1/2 x 25 1/4 x 3 1/2 in)
Courtesy: © Sophie Barber

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Derek gave me flowers in the pouring rain, 2023

Oil on canvas
198 x 183 cm (78 x 72 in)
Courtesy: © Sophie Barber

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  • Joan’s sunflowers, 2023
  • Franz dies a sculptor, 2020
  • Michael Clark, 2022
  • David loves his dachund to death, 2022
  • Birds Sing at Chapel, 2020
  • Franz at Pett Level, 2020
  • 2 Tables die Askulptur, 2020
  • Alex Katz paints Claude’s lilies, 2022
  • Edvard Munch loves his dogs so much, 2022
  • Hiding at Hythe, 2020
  • The Osaka frog, 2024
  • Wolfgang and i wish you were here, 2024
  • Renoirs flower to tell me he loves me, 2024
  • The mouse who was to marry the sun (Nezumi no Sumō), 2024
  • Derek gave me flowers in the pouring rain, 2023

Press

Ten Collectible British Artists To Have On Your Radar

Olivia Cole, Country & Town House

January 2025

Stylistic Diversity – Young Painting in London

Lorenz Ecker, KUNSTFORUM International

August 2023

Love Letters

Matthew McLean, Frieze Week

October 2022

The Best Booths at New York Art Week 2022

Brian P. Kelly, Artsy

May 2022

Girls Girls Girls: Simone Rocha’s subversive exploration of femininity

Hannah Silver, Wallpaper

April 2022

girls girls girls review – Simone Rocha curates a dazzling display of art by women

Claire Armitstead, The Guardian

April 2022

Simone Rocha on Girls Girls Girls (and baby teeth)

Maria Fitzpatrick, Financial Times

February 2022

In pictures: our pick of Frieze Los Angeles

Helen Stoilas and Benjamin Sutton, The Art Newspaper

February 2022

Certified Lover Boy: Becky Hemus on Sophie Barber

Becky Hemus, The Art Paper

November 2021

Made on the Wing: Sophie Barber’s Love Birds

Sammi Gale, Plinth

September 2021

Critics’ Picks: Sophie Barber

Philomena Epps, Artforum

September 2021

Elephant’s Pick of September’s Essential Artists

Ravi Ghosh, Elephant

September 2021

Curator at Large: Exhibitions to See in September

Phin Jennings, Rise Art

September 2021

Charisma Everywhere: Sophie Barber

Rosie Cooper, Mousse

July 2021

In the studio with Sophie Barber

Julia Michiewicz, émergent magazine

June 2021

Sophie Barber, Chris Sharp Gallery

Keith J. Varadi, Contemporary Art Review LA

May 2021

Smaller is Beautiful

Francesca Gavin, Financial Times

February 2021

Alison Jacques Gallery Adds Sophie Barber to Roster

Claire Selvin, Tessa Solomon, Maximiliano Durón, ARTnews

November 2020

Growing Scenes for London Artists

Scott Reyburn, The New York Times

October 2020

Sophie Barber wins the Platform Graduate Award

Abigail Addison, FE News

December 2017

Exhibitions

Sophie Barber: How Much Love Can a Love Bird Love, Can a Love Bird Love a Love Bird

3 September – 2 October 2021

News

Sophie Barber

Painting Sculpture: Sophie Barber & Franz West, Austrian Cultural Forum London

Sophie Barber

in ‘Sussex Modern’, Towner Eastbourne

Sophie Barber

in ‘little tree’, Ginny on Frederick, London

Tokyo Gendai: Sophie Barber

Pacifico Yokohama, Stand H04

Sophie Barber, Gordon Parks & Robert Mapplethorpe

in ‘Dog Days of Summer’, Timothy Taylor, New York

Sophie Barber

in ‘Trespass sweetly urged’, Chris Sharp Gallery at Tanya Leighton, Berlin

Sophie Barber

in ‘Some Dogs Go to Dallas’, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas

Sophie Barber

in ‘Spark Birds & the Loneliness of Species’, Hedge House, Kasteel Wijlre, Wijlre

Sophie Barber

in ‘A Minor Constellation’, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles

Sophie Barber

in ‘Small Paintings’, Venus Over Manhattan, New York

Sophie Barber

in ‘girls girls girls’, Lismore Castle, Lismore

Sophie Barber

in ‘Il était une fois…’, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims

Sophie Barber

in ‘Familiars’, Et al., San Francisco

Sophie Barber at Independent

Spring Studios, New York

Sophie Barber

in ‘Chambres d’Amis: IKEA’, Antwerp, Belgium

Sophie Barber in conversation with Daniela Steinfeld

Voices on Art Podcast

Simone Rocha with Sophie Barber

MATCHESFASHION Podcast

Sophie Barber

in ‘Particularities’, X Museum, Beijing

Sophie Barber: Kim and Kanye kiss without tongues

Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles

Sophie Barber

in ‘Le Hangar’, La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels

Sophie Barber: The Greatest Song a Songbird Ever Sung

Goldsmiths CCA, London