
Sophia Loeb, Somos os ancestrais daqueles que virão (We are the ancestors of those that are yet to come), 2024. Oil and pigment on canvas. Photo courtesy of Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.
The inaugural Spotlight Artist Sophia Loeb (b. 1997, São Paulo) creates powerful abstract paintings that explore the permeability among artist, work, audience, and the larger context of the natural world. Eschewing the traditional concept of landscape, which she feels creates a false sense of distance between us and the places we inhabit, Loeb instead refers to her works as “primordial sceneries.” This language speaks to both the sense of timelessness she seeks to communicate and that, as sceneries, the presence of the viewer is integral to her works.

Detail of Somos os ancestrais daqueles que virão (We are the ancestors of those that are yet to come), 2024. Oil and pigment on canvas. Photo courtesy of Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.
Her paintings employ a bold formal language of saturated, variable palettes, rich textures, and cacophonous gestures that conjure an organic, unfixed quality. They obliquely reference landscapes, flora, and other natural forms, but without clear representation. Rather, through abstraction, they evade distinct references and insist on the shifting possibilities of expression and perception. In this dynamic mutability, they most relate to nature and to us—ever-changing and part of larger, integrated rhythms of spirit and life. Loeb’s paintings do not distinguish among ourselves, our interior lives, and the world around us. They insist not only on the interdependence of these things, but also, more radically, on their oneness. Her paintings are sublime portals grounded in the natural world but offering other planes within it. Mirroring the endless, expansive quality of ourselves and our surroundings, her works are attuned to the fact that everything is change, inside and out.

Sophia Loeb at her studio. Photo by Wenxuan Wang, courtesy of the artist.