Described as a contemporary evolution of Frank Helmut Auerbach, Sophie Derrick utilises her aesthetic to challenge and contradict the traditional stigma of painting and photography as being two separate mediums, by removing the barriers between them.
Through the seventies and eighties expressionist painter Auerbach created an infamous body of work that until this day, remains iconic for its use of female models and textured layers of paint. Derrick has taken lead from his aesthetic and found an unexplored realm of portrait photography that displays a technical understanding of both the digital and painterly worlds.
Derrick translates paint’s materiality and substance through photography, dynamically fusing the two mediums. Acknowledging the boundaries of portraiture, Derrick uses her own body as the canvas, but introduces a masking effect, concealing her face and transforming the body into a painted object.
‘In my work the paint is most certainly more important to me than the person within it, which detaches it from traditional portraiture. I don’t see my portraits as being of me, my body is merely a base on which the paint can shine, an object’ (Derrick, 2011)
Involving a level of trompe-l’oeil concerning the surface texture, impasto paint is placed sculpturally upon the subject’s face, then rendered flat through photography, only to be
re-instated, as thick lashings of paint are laid heavily across the surface. The body becomes both the object and the subject.
DegreeArt.com would like to invite you to witness Derrick’s arresting work in her debut solo show and see Auberbach’s legacy project itself into the future.
For further information, purchase inquiries and images please contact:
PR@DegreeArt.com + 44 (0) 20 8980 0395
