Artist: Sophie Birch

For her first solo exhibition with the gallery and in London, Sophie Birch (b. 1992, UK) presents a new body of paintings that move between the intimate and the elusive, where drawing, memory, and atmosphere become ways of thinking through states of becoming. Inspired by her time during her residency at Domus Nostra in Rome, the new works emerge alongside readings of Carl Jung’s ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’ and sustained observations of the artist’s surroundings.

Jung’s image of the house as a symbol of the psyche becomes a guiding thread, opening onto a constellation of recurring forms: mosaic floors, skulls, houses, books, bodies, alongside her interest in the metaphysical architectures of Giorgio de Chirico. These motifs do not appear as fixed symbols, but as containers of psychological and imaginative space. Through Birch’s process of drawing and painting, they become permeable, as though touched by the atmosphere around them. Forms seem to hold, conceal, or give shape to something that hovers between recognition and disappearance, inviting the viewer into a space where meaning remains fluid and unsettled.

Across the paintings, spatial logic is continually built up and dissolved. Layers of marks accumulate, are rubbed back, and painted over, carrying traces of duration, revision, and recollection. Birch’s distinctive use of colour generates surfaces that flicker and shift; tones placed alongside one another create a subtle instability, producing the sensation that the image is still in the process of forming. Light appears transitional, like the moment before weather changes or day turns into evening.

Central to Birch’s practice is an interest in potential and emergence: how sensorial and emotional perceptions are constantly changing, and how painting can hold multiple states at once. The canvas becomes an active membrane, simultaneously surface and depth, image and atmosphere. Echoing the recurring image of the open book found throughout her work, these paintings function as both pictorial fields and emotional portals— spaces that can be entered, read, and felt, yet never fully grasped.

Rather than offering a single narrative, Birch is conceding the exhibition as a series of shifting encounters, where inner and outer worlds mingle, and where the familiar remains gently, persistently strange.