Opening reception: 14 November, 6.30 - 9 pm
The Sunday Painter is pleased to announce Sophie Ruigrok's forthcoming solo exhibition Rapid movement over a landscape. Running from 15 November until 21 December, the show signifies a significant shift in Ruigrok's practice from pastels on paper to paintings. It also marks the first time Ruigrok has shown a text alongside her visual work. Her piece, also titled Rapid movement over a landscape, evolved in tandem with the paintings, each medium informing the other in a symbiotic process. The text traces a week in the life of the narrator as they navigate shifting landscapes, capturing fleeting sensations and fragmented thoughts. It reflects the same themes of movement, dislocation, and connection that emerge in her visual work. You can read it here.
Sophie Ruigrok’s exhibition Rapid movement over a landscape engages ideas of subjecthood and, alighting from her fascination with out-of-body experiences, encounters with the extra-ordinary that impel the destabilisation and virtualisation of it. Finding analogy between human consciousness and naturally-occurring forms, Ruigrok intersperses paintings of both crowds and the partialled body with dramatic skies and sweeping landscapes, drawing from an array of visual sources. Of these sources, personal memories of Italian summers and cold Dutch seas play their part, as much as digital images, psychoanalysis and Constant Permeke. Clouds are a poetic choice of motif that recurs throughout, chosen by the artist not only for the volatility of their forms and their proneness to evanesce, but also their art historical and social significance as a medium to signal changes of weather or fortune. Considering the meeting and gathering of material and non-material worlds, the works comprise instances in which these different states intersect, shift, or are upturned by the experiences of the non-ordinary kind. Here, the crowd becomes a stand-in for collective consciousness; the solitary man adrift becomes one with a body of water; two showering figures allude to the first man and woman. As such, even the most arcane references reveal their inherent ability to become transpersonal, universal, archetypal. Scale is important, insofar 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. Scale is, at the same time, a function of the sublime: what is essential to experiences of awe and reverence that, in turn, render us cognisant of our own fragility.
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: today I feel relevant and alive, The Sunday Painter, London, UK (2022). Recent group exhibitions include: Imaginary Lines, Daniel Katz Gallery, London, UK (forthcoming); 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).
