Sophie Ruigrok

Sophie Ruigrok (b. 1992) lives and works in London. She received the Bloomberg New Contemporaries Prize in 2020 and the Royal Drawing School Trustees Prize in 2019.

Appropriating the scale, palette, and gleam of religious icon paintings, Sophie Ruigrok’s practice investigates how the spiritual and the everyday both reflect and rub up against each other. Her work invites the viewer to confront a world in which ecstasy appears not as an altered state, but as the simple intensification of our lived experience.

Subjects are drawn from a wide range of sources, including film stills, found photographs, stock images, and appropriations from art history, which are then fused with Ruigrok’s own autobiographical encounters and staged photographs. The resulting images are fragments from the past, present, and imagined, coalesced into non-linear narratives in which repeated motifs become increasingly refracted within the dream logic they occupy. The ethereal quality of the pastels she uses, combined with her ability to construct networks of images, allows dreamlike sequences to play out—scales, emotions, and a sense of time and place undulate in heightened states of both euphoria and melancholia.