Sonya Derviz
Closer
15 September - 28 October 2023
Sherbet Green presents Closer, a solo exhibition from Sonya Derviz, continuing, and leaning deeper into, her ongoing preoccupation with portraiture and nature, and the artistry, makeup and craft of painting as a medium.
Shifting and layered, so often obliterated into her own dialect of soft chaos, Derviz’s compositions react to collated, ephemeral visual sources, from 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.
Wrongness and wildness are central components within this praxis, in which a violence is produced through the culmination of elements not known to naturally coexist. In their intensity, they probe the visual experience of limitations and the psychological boundaries of the self. Yet these ideas remain grounded in the process of painting itself, the resultant forms directly correlated to the rhythm, action and doubt of applying paint to canvas. As she repeatedly exercises and reworks the motifs and bodies that form here, there is the sense that she moves closer to them, in their world-less guise.
Sonya Derviz, Mad girl, 2023, oil on linen, 25 x 20 cm
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 held her first solo exhibition at VO Curations, London, in 2018. Selected group exhibitions include: Bury a Friend, Roman Road, London (2023); Into My Arms, Sherbet Green, London (2023); First Light, curated by Hector Campbell, Collective Ending, London (2022); Inside Out, The Artist Room, London (2022); It Seems So Long Ago, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2020); Minimal | Maximal, LVH Art, London (2019); Parfum d’épines, Phillips x V.O Curations, Paris (2019); and Paintings by, Alex Vardoxoglou, London (2019).