Sophia Rosenthal
“Born in South Korea and raised in the Philippines before settling in the UK, I use paint as a language and vehicle for exploring memory and its complexities in relation to ideas around belonging, my identity and lived experience.
Inspired by Roland Barthes’ texts Camera Lucida and the theory of the punctum, my recent paintings are prompted by noticing something unusual or unexpected in the personal photographs from my childhood. These discoveries are at the heart of my current work.
Painting directly from the photograph forming the basis of my creative process, I aim to capture something of the emergent, elusive nature of memory and recollections. I create fragments of intimate imagery that uses an active combination of the affects of both paint and photograph, conjuring uncanny familiarity and feelings of displacement.
I am influenced by post impressionism, photography, and the material practices of painters in the 1960s New figuration movement. I have developed a playful yet meticulous process of cropping, glazing, layering, and masking, creating subtle, textural spaces, where the layering of materials come through to the surface in unexpected ways.
Through the more poetic, slow, and chance induced process of painting, I am able to interrogate and reframe my own notions of memory, instead reframing it as embodied, and reflexive to surrounding environments – not as something static or necessarily in the past, but as fragments that resurfaces and reforms. It is an active, felt experience that sits in the body and in the space between images.”
Biography
Sophia Rosenthal graduated with Distinction in MA Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art
School and was awarded the Standpoint Artist Residency Prize in 2024. She has
undertaken residencies at Porthmeor Studios, St Ives (2018), and has exhibited with Tate St
Ives (2018); The Poly, Falmouth (2018); The Cornish Bank, Falmouth (2021); Assembly Point
Studios, London (2019, in a graduate exhibition selected by Sacha Craddock and Jesse
Leroy-Smith); and at the Academy of Fine Art in Venice as an Erasmus
grantee (2018).
In 2024, Rosenthal participated in group exhibitions including ‘Entranced Essence’
(RuptureXibit, London), ‘Sprung24’ (Prema Arts Centre, Dursley), and ‘Art Lark’ (Electro
Studios Project Space, St Leonards-on-Sea). She was shortlisted for the Contemporary
British Painting Prize 2024, and received both The Judith Tucker Memorial Prize selected
by Lubaina Himid, Griselda Pollock, and Harriet Tarlo, and The Blyth Gallery Award to exhibit in late 2026.
