A studio visit with Sophia Lapres
Mixed Blessings opens tonight at Towards
I visited Sophia Lapres’s studio last week spontaneously. I was in her studio building when someone told me she had a space upstairs and was around, suggesting maybe I’d like to visit. I don’t think I’ve ever sent a DM so quickly—asking if I could swing by and say hi. She graciously said yes.
I’m familiar with Lapres’s work—representational paintings made with quick, confident brushstrokes. The long and roving titles are like short stories (think: Lydia Davis) and wrap up the paintings like a bow. Her new work is the same, but different. Painted on custom-made aluminum canvases, the paintings are even faster. You can see the drips in paint as it slides down the slick metal surface.
The surface also necessitates a softness. There’s no need to press the brush into the surface for the fabric to absorb the pigment. Instead, the opposite is true. Lapres has to be delicate and careful, ensuring that paint doesn’t get picked back up with too rigorous a stroke or rough a brush. There’s a metaphor here for the gentleness with which Lapres depicts her subjects—full of nostalgia and care.
Mixed Blessings is on from October 10 to November 16, 2024, at Towards Gallery in Toronto. The opening is tonight (October 10), 6-9 p.m.. See you there?
Sophia Lapres is based in Toronto, Ontario. She is an artist working between painting and writing.
Lapres also has Substack!
She posts infrequent reviews and dispatches from her studio. The most recent post pulls back the curtain on what paintings she was looking at as she made work for this exhibition.
Lapres on how she came up with the title “Mixed Blessings”:
I picked this book up a year ago when I had been thinking a lot about women’s fantasies, girlhood, secrets, populism, domesticity, and trad wives among other things (and in no particular order). I should do my due diligence, I thought. Unfortunately for me, it wasn’t good. But I do love the title.
If you’re at the opening tonight, say hi!
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