Blond Contemporary presents: The Lines Between Us by Sophia Bounou

Blond Contemporary presents the last weekend of: The Lines Between Us by Sophia Bounou. This show is accompanied by works from Blond Contemporary artists in the downstairs gallery. About Sophia Bounou is an American born artist of French Moroccan extraction, whose vibrant, instinctive paintings transform the people, relationships and experiences surrounding her into densely layered visual worlds. Her universe is at once both contemporary and primordial. Contemporary in the sense of a synthesis of modernist line with street art and redolent colour. Primordial in respect of her symbolic forms that go back to the original typology of the first people and first patterns on earth. In her art intuition exceeds concept and makes more sense thereby. Bounou has developed a distinctive language of abstracted figures, interlocking forms, expressive line, colour and pattern. At first glance the work looks aboriginal in inspiration as it has a clear cosmology and code. But the recurrent patterning and mark making craft the birth of symbolisation as concurrent with the rise of humanity and it depicts both. This marks her distinction as indigenous work from Australia is almost universally abstract - a permanent meditation on the absolute. But Bounou’s ultimate foundation does not contemplate itself - it instead delights in relation and the other beings that it engenders. Her cosmology is the ‘all’ of the world and all the beings therein, living animations of human affection and discernment. Perhaps this is why her work affects so widely and so deeply - it is the art of first things. A celebration and elevation of memory and human experience within a whole whose parts are unforgettable incarnations of ourselves in a time long past and forever present. - Phillip Blond, Gallery Director Read more Toggle Prints Drawing Photography Painting