By Andy Martinelli Clark
February 5, 2025
HEMPHILL is pleased to share Andy Martinell Clark's review of SOPHIA BELKIN for ARTFORUM.
As in nature, there are no straight lines to be found in the fourteen kaleidoscopic, textile-based abstractions that populate Sophia Belkin’s first solo exhibition at Hemphill. It is fitting, then, that many of the poetic titles ascribed to these jaunty paintings reference the terrestrial, the aquatic, and the utterly cosmic. Take Lunar Spring (all works 2024), a name that appears to honor the Chinese New Year, or Echo in Moss, which combines the allegorical with the earthbound. As is clear from the horror vacui of the compositions, the Moscow-born, Baltimore-based artist is a master of maximalism and a die-hard collagist who adroitly harnesses an encyclopedic constellation of formal motifs that recur within an ostensibly infinite number of permutations. Each dazzling piece features a sprightly confection of sourced fabric that is digitally printed, soak-stained with multicolored dyes, and screen-printed before being sutured together with the aid of a futuristic-looking CNC embroidery machine that would have been at home in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Belkin has said that she endeavors to make paintings “that can be viewed both through a telescope or a microscope.” She is doubtless succeeding in that regard. The latter aspiration is best exemplified by Parts of a Heart, located near the back of the gallery. The title seems apt, as I could not imagine the wriggling, mottled-pink forms adorning the canvas’s lower-right corner to be anything other than cardiological tubules. While somewhat chromatically subdued in comparison to its neighbors, the image aims straight for the gut, or rather, the heart.
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