Sophie Wahlquist

Artist Statement

In my work I explore themes of growth and reprodution. I am aiming for an image of the phsychologicalstates of humans raising questions about their role in this world. Social anxieties in an increasingly individualized society are reoccuring concepts which inform the shapes and figures in my work. Customized comfort and a freedom that is borderlining with lonelyness provoke fear of redundancy and a sugarcoated longing for nature and its rigid conditions. Questioning the duality of the physical, definable body and the emotional, inner self, I play with suggestions of analogies between machines or plants and the human body. Bodily and mental orefices.Blind spots and the abyss.Fight for survival. Rhythm.Eruption of confidence.Imagination of futuristic technology. My paintings depart from a state of mind rather than from a narrative. Playing with different genres of painting and medium, new gestures and perspectives reverse existing ideas. I like to negotiate the level to which absence can be replaced by clarity of something intangible or how the depiction of something recognisable can become a trigger for imagination. Flowers become portraits of groups rather than a still life and I can relate to a breastfeeding monkey as much as I feel the estrangement and separation I find between people.

The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.