Sophie Reinhold

Sophie Reinhold's work possess a unique quirkiness derived from her appreciation for history, ornamentation, and romantic visual clichés. The paintings depict a playful and tongue-in-cheek quality that flirts with a naive sentimentality, resulting in a witty casualness and enjoyment. The imagery depicted features enchanted ruins and dense foliage, which serve as vehicles for exploring the propagation and transmission of shared folkloric codes and moral principles in fairy tales through whispered narratives. The pictorial content stands out against the white background, preserving the lightness of a sketch. Reinhold uses a technique that involves applying ground marble in multiple layers and selectively removing it from certain areas to carve out specific shapes, resulting in a relief structure that gives the paintings a sculptural quality. She employs various painterly modes, such as rhythmic lines, finger smudges, and smooth surfaces with cutaways that reveal the constructed nature of the image and the textile weave of the canvas. The paintings' familiarity can quickly turn into an uncanny quality due to their oscillation between figuration and abstraction, letter and picture, material and sign, as well as their declaration of the temporariness and latency of meaning.