Sophie Grant is an artist using painting, drawing, collage, and processes of transference and erasure to create energetic abstractions. In her work, foregrounds and backgrounds fluctuate with compositions that challenge depth perception. Pours of paint and crusty stains coagulate, evoking erosion and relief. Hand built ceramics punctuate fields of flatness, adding dimension to the rigid support of a wall. Her recent drawings are graphite rubbings that explore temporary physical and psychological sites through the echoes of histories embedded in object surfaces. These works grapple with ideas of boundaries and containers, and question what delineates the periphery of objects. Sophie’s practice culls and compresses disjointed gestures, allowing shapes, digits, and surface variations to become units of measurement and unknowable markers. The result is a materially varied set of transcribed bodily perceptions, grounded in the subject of landscape.Sophie Grant was born in Santa Cruz, California and lives and works in New York City. She received her BA in Painting from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2008, completed her MFA at Hunter College in 2015, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2015. She has been a former participant in Shandaken’s Paint School, The Hercules Art Studio Program, and The Keyholder Program at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York, NY, as well as a former resident at The Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, FL, The Pajama Factory in Williamsport, PA, and Painting’s Edge in Idyllwild, CA. Her work has been exhibited at Flag Art Foundation, Spring Break, Underdonk and Y2k Gallery among others. Publications include The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Artist’s Institute Hunted Book Series, and New American Paintings.
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