Sophia Loeb’s studio in São Paulo is unusually orderly for an artist known for dense, thickly layered paintings. The Brazilian painter has been working seven days a week since November on new works for her latest exhibition, “O Manifesto Da Luz Antes Do Amanhecer” (“The Manifesto of Light Before Dawn”), which opens at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London on June 5 and runs through July 4. Loeb says a tidy workspace helps her think clearly and allows ideas to emerge without distraction.
After returning to Brazil last fall, Loeb moved into a two-story, three-bedroom house near Ibirapuera Park that now serves as both home and studio. She paints on the lower floor and keeps finished works upstairs. The larger space marks a major change from her time in London, where she worked in a small shared room with other artists. She says the São Paulo neighborhood brings her a sense of calm, and even the sound of birds adds to the atmosphere. Her parents, with whom she is again living full time, visit regularly to see her progress.
The exhibition was shaped by personal routines and repeated rituals. Loeb says she became attached to eating the same Brazilian lunch every day while preparing the show, and she also listened constantly to Kate Bush and the soundtrack from “Cats” throughout the day as she painted. She believes these fixations become part of her creative process. Loeb also kept her studio practice private, avoiding visitors and spending months working in near isolation.
Loeb knew she wanted to be an artist from an early age. A visit to a contemporary art fair in Paris around age 12 convinced her that a life in art was possible. At 18, she left Brazil for the United Kingdom, studying first at Camberwell College of Arts, then at Goldsmiths University, and later at the Royal College of Art. She says the transition was difficult at first because she felt misunderstood, but the experience deepened her commitment to making art.
Her paintings are often described as intense landscapes that suggest prehistoric worlds or post-human futures. Loeb says she believes the places she paints exist somewhere, even if she cannot fully identify them. Her canvases combine abstract forms with leaf-like shapes, flowers and explosive color. For the current show, she introduced new colors such as pink and blue, along with iridescent pearl tones that create a misty, greenhouse-like atmosphere. Fog is a recurring motif in the exhibition, which she says has a surreal quality rarely associated with Brazil.
Working with palette knives and her hands, Loeb paints intuitively, often turning canvases on the floor as the image develops. She says her work is guided by cosmic imagery and scientific ideas about space, planets and stars. For Loeb, painting is a way of revealing something that already exists, even before it is made visible on the canvas.
