Sophia Rosenthal London, United Kingdom

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Sophia Rosenthal was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2024, and won The Judith Tucker Memorial Prize selected by Lubaina Himid, Griselda Pollock and Harriet Tarlo. Graduating with a Distinction in MA Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School, Sophia subsequently won the Standpoint Artist Residency Prize 2024 which culminated in a solo show, 'Golden Hour' 2025.

Born in South Korea, raised in the Philippines, and now based in the UK, my painting practice is rooted in a desire to explore memory - particularly as they relate to identity, belonging, and migration. Working primarily from personal childhood photographs, I am drawn to the unexpected or overlooked, yet charged details in these images, what Roland Barthes calls the punctum, and defines as the emotional or disruptive element that punctures the frame. These discoveries are at the heart of my current work.

Painting directly from the photograph forming the basis of my creative process, I aim to capture something of the elusive and emergent nature of memory and recollections. I create fragments of intimate imagery that uses an active combination of the affects of both paint and photograph, conjuring uncanny familiarity and feelings of displacement.

My work explores themes of loss, longing, and the fragmented memories that often accompany a history of migration. Influenced by the material practices of painters in the 1960s New Figuration movement, I have developed a process of cropping, glazing, layering, and masking that reflects subtle, textural surfaces where meaning emerges as paint also come through to the surface in unexpected ways.

Painting is, for me, a poetic and intuitive practice: slow, open to chance, and deeply embodied. It allows me to interrogate and reframe personal narratives of memory not as linear or fixed, but as relational and impressionistic – alive to context, sensation, and environment. In doing so, I open up space for exploring more fluid, and layered new realities that speak to broader questions of identity and belonging.