Selected by Aaron Angell
Britain is wyrd again, and the current outlook of a lot of graduate art in this country seems soused in an agnostic, hedge-witch, woodsmoke-and-fungus nostalgia that shows no sign of abating. Often problematically faux-naïf at best and tendentiously anti-intellectual at worst, the produce has been of extremely mixed quality. But this aesthetic tendency has its stars and shining planets, and Sofya Shpurova is among the shiniest.
I was introduced to Sofya’s work in 2019 at the Slade School of Fine Art ba degree show in London. The show was an astonishing riot of pagan image-making, and it seemed perhaps that under the influence of tutors like Alastair Mackinven all the painters there had gone mad and were now doing this sort of chthonic, fin-de-siècle history painting, conjuring the spirit of Odilon Redon and Louis Eilshemius, rather than any painter of this century. Sofya’s gnarly, deeply personal work stood out among much else I saw. She then came on residency at Troy Town, the London pottery I direct, producing sculpture that was shown alongside largescale oil paintings for her first solo exhibition (Low Human Activity, at the Holden Gallery in Manchester) later in 2019.
That exhibition was fantastic, and Sofya’s work is a thing of rare and cryptic beauty. Autobiographical but not annoying, ‘folk’ but not patronising, occult but understanding, sugary but aggressively incoherent. Oh, and she can really paint and produce surfaces in a way that feels alchemical and nuanced, which means that the 2D works merge easily with her sculptural output in difficult materials like ceramic. Works such as The clay veined girl holds trembling skin (me as a retort) (2019) are full of this real wholegrain vitality that sings as much at scale as it does in her jewel-like miniatures and works on paper. Sofya is one of those people who was clearly born to paint, born to make images and to live in them. If this country had any justice she would be commissioned to paint the royals. And their dogs. She’s really good at dogs.
Sofya Shpurova is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist working in painting and ceramics. A graduate of London UCL Slade School of Fine Art in 2019, Shpurova had a solo show of work at Holden Gallery in Manchester that same year and has been shown in group exhibitions more recently.
Aaron Angell is an artist and director of Troy Town, a ceramics studio in London
