As other artists of her generation, Sophie von Hellermann (born 1978 in Munich, lives and works in New York) allows herself to draw from the history
of
painting and from its progressively acquired liberties in order to trace her singular path.
From this singular space, she uses painting as an instrument that allows her
simultaneously to appropriate and to excuse herself from reality. Each one of SvH's
paintings condenses a story, and contains it perfectly within the limits of the frame, yet it
is pierced full of holes from within. These empty spaces imbue her works with their
evocative power : a capacity first to absorb the gaze and then to expose both the
imagination and the memory to sensation. The subject-matter of her essentially narrative
paintings is at the intersection of a personal and a collective history, without there being
any clear boundaries between the two. Rapid execution, a prolific output, a casual style,
narratives which blend history and the everyday, a permanent confusion between the
trivial and the grandiose are the instruments she uses to transgress the rules of propriety
in painting.
