Like a scene by Édouard Vuillard, Sophie Treppendahl’s paintings present familiar places to which we have never been. Her interiors are warm and inviting. Comfortable and full of reading, art-making, eating, cooking – life.

However, the placement of Treppendahl’s objects is particular. She composes “in the flatbed,” meaning that she builds her composition with an eye not only to perspectival space, but also to the flatness of the picture plane, with shape, line and color pushing and pulling, moving the viewer’s eye.

In Treppendahl’s work, the viewer often sees the passing of time: things that happened; things waiting to happen.

The viewer sees the remains of a dinner party, the light moving through a room, opened books a reader has enjoyed. As viewers we follow this same trajectory, moving through Treppendahl’s paintings at our own pace, in our own space, in our own time.

Sophie Treppendahl’s paintings explore, “color, homes, and the art of taking care of yourself,” Treppendahl writes. Taking care of oneself, in her practice, means listening to one’s own internal voices, and responding to these voices by way of pictorial representation and the movement of paint on the canvas. 

“Through painting, I aim to capture not the likeness to an image but the overwhelming feeling of the space or a memory. In my studio, I work from recorded observations, often photographs and drawings, that then serve as a springboard to explore pattern, color, light and shadow.

When creating, the representation becomes secondary, my primary focus becoming the painting process itself. As I translate reflection, pattern, and shadows through paint, the image lends itself to abstraction, manipulation and exaggeration. Through this, the painting takes on new life. And instead of creating a hollow representation of a moment that once was, I hope to create something altogether new.”

The ways in which we build our own individual spaces – and how Treppendahl builds her paintings – tell us complicated and subtle things about ourselves, our interiority, that of those around us, how we relate to each other, and to ourselves.

Sophie Treppendahl
Represented by Philip Martin Gallery
Los Angeles, USA
https://philipmartingallery.com/
http://www.sophietreppendahl.com/

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