Artist Sophie Cape is set to ignite the Hong Kong Art Fair 2012 with her unique and bold interrogation of traditional portraiture. Poached instantly at her highly awarded graduation from the National Art School with the endorsement of master painter John Olsen, who termed her “a bright morning star”, there is much fervour regarding the raw and precocious talent of this new wunderkind of Australian Art. Her debut solo show for the prestigious Tim Olsen Gallery in 2011 saw every work sold before doors were opened to the public. Since this unprecedented success she has fulfilled a constant stream of commissions and has attended residencies in Poland, France and Austria.
Cape’s presentation will include work from the Alps that is reflective of an emotional homecoming for her. After a near fatal crash, she was forced to retire from her career as a champion ski-racer and sprint cyclist. The devastation of losing her chance at Olympic Gold and the trauma of having broken 57 bones in her body is represented by symbolic carnage and visceral gore that explodes across the canvas.
Mining her past as an elite athlete she paints physically using her body as a direct tool, her process being reminiscent of the 60’s action painters. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, the works are described as Psychological Self-Portraits. Using unconventional mediums such as bitumen, oil, detritus, soils, blood and bones, Cape employs automatic writing and blind drawing to render pure marks as signifiers of the unconscious. They are executed in situ, free from constraints and enclosures and are of a scale that extends well beyond her full reach in order to facilitate an uncontrolled expressiveness. Sleeping under the stars, she stays with the work in the environment for weeks at a time establishing a dialogue between her internal and external landscape. Recently while working in the snow at minus 30 degrees, Cape lost an entire body of work as she was struck and engulfed by the same avalanche that buried and injured over thirty people including a Prince of the Netherlands who is still on life support in hospital. Cape evokes the Kantian idea of the sublime described as the awe, power, beauty and terror of nature and is therefore compelled to seek extreme environments in which to create Art.
Recent works from her time examining the survival and decay in the Australian desert will also be exhibited along with her People’s Choice Award winning entry from the Portia Geach Memorial Portrait Prize 2011. Of this piece critic John McDonald wrote, “Had they (the judges) been looking for something truly ''bold and audacious'' (to win), they might have considered Sophie Cape's Master and Commander, a large expressionist portrait painted in the same vigorous style as the abstractions in the artist's debut show at the Tim Olsen Gallery earlier this year. The subject is Admiral Paul Watson, an uncompromising subject for an uncompromising painting. This is the most ambitious work in the show in terms of scale and is executed with a freedom that makes many other offerings seem uptight and timid.”
The sweeping expressiveness she produces in her work is overwhelmingly powerful and almost repelling, yet the seductive tactility of the surface acts as a lure, creating an emotional state the spectator may inhabit freely. Her need to affect the audience with a more theatrical encounter demands that she excavate her own inner life (and therefore humankind’s) unflinchingly. “Our identity today is defined by how others see us, or how we choose or want the world to see us. I need to go beyond that, look deeper and investigate more thoroughly the darkness of the world inside. I want to rip the face and the figure wide open.” As a result the viewer is exposed to a direct and authentic experience of life, a reveal of the confronting truth of how beauty and horror co-exist in the same moment and how one without the other is ultimately superficial or false.
