Sofia Berakha, Espiral, oráculo, ángel (Spiral, oracle, angel), 2022. Oil on canvas. 140 x 180 cm.

Courtesy of the artist and Lodos, Mexico City.

City, Babies, Mothers, Strollers, Painting.

For Sofia Berakha (b.1984, Buenos Aires), painting is the construction of an image by addition, starting from a void until gradually forming, with different brushstrokes and effects, recognizable objects and spaces. The results encourage a dialogue between abstraction and figuration.

In her paintings we find grid like surfaces and surrealist patterns that dissolve into city landscapes. The condition of painting as medium and the manipulation of materiality are central to the character of her work. In some instances, her paintings grow beyond their limits by integrating postcards, textiles, chains, pockets and other various forms of accessories. Through these processes the role of painting as information and its search for objecthood is evidenced.

Berakha’s most recent paintings are figurative urban scenes in which city landscapes are the stage for subjects, actions and potential conflicts. Everything is addition. The elements that make up a city: billboards, fences, buildings, cars, and people are layered into the construction of a scene. In these recent paintings, Berakha focuses the attention on mothers and their babies. The territory of the city is also an immense body that we inhabit, use, share and even abuse. These scenes go against the traditional way of portraying the symbiotic mother-offspring relationship in a separate, reserved, interior world, outside the public. Intimacy is corrupted and becomes social.

Installation view, Sofia Berakha, Tartán, Lodos, Mexico City, 2022

Sofia Berakha lives and works in Buenos Aires and Berlin.

Solo exhibitions include Tartán, Lodos, Mexico City (2022); Paintings Arranged, 3rd Floor Berlin, Berlin (2019); Autopartes, Aldo de Sousa Gallery, Buenos Aires (2018); and Melodrama Panorama, Big Sur Gallery, Buenos Aires (2016).

She studied in the Artists Program at Torcuato Di Tella University, Buenos Aires (2012) and in the Master of Arts in the class of Jutta Koether at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg (2018).

Since 2017 co-founder of Fantazia, artist run project space, Buenos Aires, AR.