Sof’ya Shpurova
I’m a surgeon, maybe just of some other kind
February 8, 2025–April 13, 2025
Reception: Saturday February 8, 6–8pm
The surface is a human skin, the erosion of which (scars or blemishes) creates a sympathetic connection to the viewer. That said, plenty of abstract painters worked from the surface towards an object. The skin, and the brutality inflicted upon it, is universal. Violence and upheaval are omnipotent. Thus, from this chaotic surface, an image emerges.
“I am looking for a space in between connective organ tissue, moments of high tension, simultaneous violence and fragility, fear and humour, repulsion and attraction, on the verge of being dumb and sophisticated.”
Alas, another contradiction arises. Conflict arises with ‘sentimentality’ despite the fact that her figures are largely taken from those closest to her: a husband, ex-lovers, friends, and herself. The repeated allusions to her own image are, as she says, an effort made by her to signal a disinterest in typical portraiture. Highly influenced by the subcultural fascinations of teenagers, it seems sentimentality would be impossible to avoid here. To start with chaos and move towards the image is to move towards meaning. Meaning is sentiment. Can one truly strip away the layers of a person they love to their anguished surface? To bludgeoned flesh?
Michel Houellebecq says that literature is the only truly conceptual art. Words are concepts, as are clichés. Abstract painting then is in essence the only truly non-conceptual art. An image can materialize from chaos without a broader arc guiding it, surely.
Nevertheless, her titles luxuriate in language. The length and poetic depth of her paintings’ titles recall the unconscious, discouraged audiences from projecting narrative or direct meaning onto his work. Sof’ya’s titles allude to an inevitable curiosity she demonstrates in the face of her paintings’ imagery and materiality.
While her paintings make an effort to stand apart from conceptualism, her titles are nothing less than works of conceptual art. Sof’ya, for various reasons both personal and conceptual, remains fascinated by images associated with madness, the images of a disturbed mind, and the tension between madness and sanity. Tension is born of the failure to reconcile two oppositional stances. I firmly believe that artistic style is born of failure. If I try to write a book as addictive as someone like Raymond Chandler, for instance, I will fail. But in that failure, my own personal style metastasizes. This is how I ultimately read Sof’ya’s approach to painting. She has her stated intentions, of course, but it is in her failures to achieve those intentions that her style becomes her own and that her art becomes beautiful. As in the failure to achieve certain painterly goals, it is also true that striving to escape mental illness in various ways and failing in various other ways is what creates a human’s proverbial ‘character’. It is in what we do and what we fail to do as we envisioned that we become unique. It is in our contradictory beliefs and failures of logic that we become artists. In the striving to give meaning to the chaos that imbibes us, we become superhuman.
—Adam Lehrer, February 2025.
Sof’ya Shpurova (b. 1996, Moscow, Russia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her MFA in 2024 at Columbia University and her BFA in 2019 from The Slade School of Art, University College London. Shpurova’s work has been exhibited at Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, Szena Gallery, Moscow, Holden Gallery, Manchester School of Art, Manchester, CABIN, New York, C L E A R I N G, New York, and Wallach Gallery, Columbia University, New York, among others.