Inspired by accounts of out-of-body and near-death experiences, Sophie Ruigrok's practice explores ideas of subjecthood, consciousness, and the destabilisation of the self. Driven by an inner compulsion to document images and concepts that compel her, Ruigrok’s process begins with collecting diverse inspirational elements – from overheard phrases and literary passages to more ethereal sources like dream atmospheres or emotional states. As Ruigrok develops her sketches, she often encounters gaps in the visual narrative. To bridge these voids, she thoughtfully borrows from art history, creating drawings and paintings that function as intricate composites of her personal universe. The resulting images are fragments from the past, present and the imagined, coalesced into non-linear narratives in which the repetition of motifs become increasingly refracted within the dream logic they occupy.
Finding parallels between human consciousness and natural forms, Ruigrok's recent paintings intersperse depictions of crowds and the human form with dramatic skies and sweeping landscapes. In these works, the crowd functions as a stand-in for collective consciousness, the mass of bodies merging to suggest a loss of individual boundaries and a sense of becoming one unified entity. This reflection on the experience of being subsumed within a larger group speaks to the way the non-ordinary states explored in Ruigrok's practice can fundamentally alter our perception of self in relation to the broader world.
Scale plays an important element, as Ruigrok employs varied canvas formats to invoke the bigness or smallness of a certain observation, thought or feeling, and its unique yet interconnected placement within a broader constellation. In this way, scale functions as a gateway to the sublime, rendering us cognizant of our own fragility in the face of expansive natural and psychic phenomena. Clouds serve as a poetic motif, chosen for the volatility of their forms, their proneness to ephemerality, and their art historical significance as a medium to signal the sacred and transcendent. Drawing from an array of visual sources – including personal memories, digital imagery, psychoanalysis, and the work of painters Constant Permeke and Theodore Géricault – Ruigrok’s paintings comprise instances where different states of being intersect, shift, or are upended by experiences that transcend the individual.
Sophie Ruigrok (b. 1992) lives and works in London. She received the Bloomberg New Contemporaries Prize in 2020 and the Royal Drawing School Trustees Prize in 2019. In 2024 she took part in the Palazzo Monti Residency in Brescia, Italy. Recent solo exhibitions include: Rapid movement over a landscape, The Sunday Painter, London, UK (2024) and today I feel relevant and alive, The Sunday Painter, London, UK (2022). Recent group exhibitions include: The Great Women Artists V, Curated by Katy Hessel and Edoardo Monti, Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2024); Imaginary Lines, Daniel Katz Gallery, London, UK (2024); Home and Away, Curated by Matt Carey Williams, Gallery 2, Seoul, South Korea (2024); Stilled Images, Tube Gallery, Palma, Spain (2023); In Three Acts, Huxley-Parlour, London, UK (2023); It’s Better to be Cats than to be Loved, Tabula Rasa Gallery, London, UK (2022); Parallel Universe, Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal, Canada (2022); Dream Baby Dream, Fitzrovia Gallery, London, UK (2022); Love is the Devil: Studies after Francis Bacon, Marlborough, London, UK (2021); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London, UK (2021); A Grain of Sand, The Sunday Painter, London, UK (2021); Art on a Postcard, Auction for International Women’s Day, online (2021); San Mei Gallery, London, UK 2020; Onward & Upward: Art in Times of Uncertainty, Droog, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2019).