At 28 years old, Sophia Loeb, from São Paulo, has been attracting the attention of the art world with her sensory and intense work.
By Pedro Borg – translated from Portuguese
The intensity of Sophia Loeb 's art goes hand in hand with the rhythm of her career. Even at a young age, 28, the artist is already present in major galleries in Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States with a unique style, a kinetic and sensory art made on canvas that is attracting the most attentive eyes in the art world.
Having trained entirely in London — including stints at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths University — Sophia now returns to Brazil for the most ambitious project of her career, where proximity to her country of birth is essential to achieving the desired result.
“After eight years living in London, I returned to Brazil for a project that requires constant presence. I want to do something super ambitious, so it’s better to be in Brazil,” she said in an interview with Page9 during the Brazil Project, an event at Harvard and MIT that brought together some of the country’s leading minds. She was the event’s protagonist in the art field, where she participated in a panel with Marcelo Coelho, director of the MIT Design Intelligence Lab.
Even after nearly a decade living abroad, Sophia's art is profoundly Brazilian. She likes to say that her creative process is an intense internal dialogue where she combines thoughts, feelings, and memories to bring her paintings to life. And when she speaks of memory, she always refers to the time she spent in Brazil: the landscapes, the sounds, the colors, and the sensations experienced in the country.
She combines thoughts and memories with sensory stimuli and references from other art forms, which are then dissolved onto the canvas through her own painting process, where the mixture of materials brings a sculptural approach to painting on canvas. The result is an abstract art that stems from figurative concepts.
“It’s a very difficult process to understand, it’s non-linear, very abstract and requires attention. If I don’t finish a work, it starts to frustrate me and I need to finish what I started. But everything is momentary, I don’t plan anything, I don’t look at anything. In each work I am testing my own ability,” said Sophia.
The reference to sculptural work in her paintings is no coincidence. Sophia explains that it was her connection with sculpture that allowed her to broaden her perspective when painting on canvas.
“After I discovered I could be a sculptor, I lost my fear of painting. Painting can be very daunting, so the moment I realized I was also a sculptor, I developed this wisdom for painting, and my art flourished in terms of how I produce, with the layers and the quality of my work. Sculpting took the weight off my shoulders when it came to painting,” explains Sophia.
It was from this liberation that Sophia managed to create her own language, bringing relief and textures to the canvas. "I feel like I'm building something new, something no one has ever seen before, so I'm confident about the authenticity of the visual structure of my work," says the artist in a serene tone, certain of the path she is on.
But Sophia doesn't always approach her work in a centered way. In fact, it was frustration that led her to reach this point of equilibrium and develop her language.
She says that during the pandemic she spent some time in São Paulo before returning to her master's program in London, and felt that her paintings weren't reaching the point she wanted them to. One particular work was keeping her awake at night.
“I spent hours staring angrily at the canvas. It kept staring back at me, and I wanted to kill it [the canvas], so I thought, ‘You know what, I’m going to destroy this canvas.’ I ran out, grabbed everything I had on the table—because I was about to leave the studio—and threw it all at it like a madwoman. I destroyed the canvas, and it turned out perfect,” Sophia recounted with a modest but proud smile.
During the process she threw pigments, painted with her hands, used oil sticks , and changed the position of the canvas throughout the process. In the end, Sophia said, "That's it": her impulse took her art where she wanted it to go.
The title of the work? Eureka , an expression from Greek meaning "I found it" or "I discovered it".
“It was my 'eureka' moment, an epiphany,” he said. “I’ve used that process in all the work I do today because of that painting. This thing of throwing it on the floor, changing perspective, everything.”
Today, confident that she has achieved her own artistic language, Sophia aims for new heights and wants to create "monumental" art.
“I want my art to be monumental. But a small painting can be monumental, so I want to have my works in very special and distinct places,” explains the artist.
