Sonya Derviz (b. 1994, Moscow) lives and works in London. She graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art in 2018, having previously completed her Foundation Diploma at Central Saint Martins. She was awarded the UCL Dean’s List and Stanbury Prize (both in 2018) and also the UCL Art Museum Award (2017).

Derviz's paintings are shifting and layered, so often obliterated into her own dialect of soft chaos. Her compositions react to collated, ephemeral visual sources, from her surroundings, found drawings, illustrations, paintings and film stills. Focusing not on the image as a whole, but on the specific elements contained within it, she draws in and repeatedly readjusts these pictures until they dissipate into new metaphysical shapes. This fragmentation allows her to consider these strands as if solely visual, re-writing them into an intuitive artistic language that veers towards expression and emotion over linearity and fixed ideas.