Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, the work of Sophie Cape straddles the sublime with a cathartic expulsion of energy. Exploding with violence across the page, her works are vast in scale and performative in their execution.
Visceral and dramatic, harking back to her past as an elite and damaged athlete, Cape seeks a raw, direct expression through engagement with the body’s physicality in order to render an instinctual and emotional act of expression.
Working outside in the desert, free from constraints, using unconventional mediums and revelling in their gross materiality, Cape excavates her unconscious in the desire to rip the figure and face wide open. These works are psychological self portraits, voicing the dialogue between the internal and external landscape, and of past and present experience.
The contrast of survival and decay, be it in a desert landscape, in the physical body, or in the mind, is where Cape is searching for what lies between the beauty and the horror that is the exquisite tragedy of the human condition. Offering a theatrical encounter with the spectator in the hope of breaking through language, to touch life.
Exhibition Articles
October 2019
Film
Sophie Cape’s paintings are elemental – seemingly made of fire and snow, earth and blood. And the truth is not far from that; the huge works are impregnated with the ash and soil and bones and metal fragments on the ground in the locations where the works were created. As a past Olympic-level athlete, Sophie’s process is explosively physical, with violently cathartic struggles on the canvas. But as she explains to Richard Morecroft, the controlled mark of her hand is in evidence too, with subtle drawing and mysterious calligraphy.
Film
Sophie Cape at the opening of her latest exhibition Maelstrom, November 2018 Part 1 of 2
Film
Described as more like a “rock star” than a painter, Sophie Cape never wanted to be an artist.
A former elite athlete, she was destined for the Olympic Games in two separate sports — first as a downhill ski racer and then as a track cyclist — but her sporting career was shattered after suffering catastrophic injury and undergoing controversial “experimental” body-modification surgery intended to ease her pain and help her performance.
Left physically and psychologically traumatised, Sophie Cape then transformed herself into one of Australia’s most celebrated young artists. It’s a profession she has long resisted, as both her mother Ann Cape and her grandmother the late Gwenna Welch are highly regarded artists. But now Sophie Cape has no doubt about becoming the third generation artist in her family: “Art saved me.”
Film
Sophie Cape in conversation with broadcaster Richard Morecroft discussing the exhibition 'Shadows of White – From Shaolin to Everest'.
