Sofia Silva – Notizie da lei

Per la sua prima mostra con la galleria, Sofia Silva presenta una nuova serie di dipinti in cui il vissuto autobiografico prende forma attraverso case, sezioni di autoritratti e omaggi al padre. Una pittura analitica che si nutre di memoria, sottrazione e luce.

Comunicato stampa

Barbati Gallery is pleased to announce Sofia Silva’s first exhibition with the gallery, Notizie da lei [News from Her]. The exhibition features paintings that the artist realized between 2024 and 2025. The subjects are autobiographical: houses, sections of self-portraits and abstractions with a focus on and dedicated to the artist’s father.

Silva chooses to paint her own everyday life in a provincial Italian town, a life devoted to her studies and the care of her loved ones. She intentionally does away with any form of dreamlike, surrealist, archetypal or pulp-like imagery.

The houses are the ones Sofia Silva observed every day as a young girl on her way to school. Residential dwellings that stand along three of the four city walls of Padua, walls dating back to the age of the Communes, the Carrarese and the Renaissance.

The self-portrait sections are captured in moments that replicate the gestures of sacred art, particularly those of offering and presentation. They speak of a long-suffering relationship with the body, ‘rediscovered’ through the mediation of art and especially literature. Silva is indeed an ardent reader of ancient and modern mystics.

The paintings dedicated to her father – the writer, filmmaker and psychoanalyst Umberto Silva (1943) – feature painted words and clues leading back to familiar anecdotes. The neurodegenerative disease from which her beloved father has suffered for more than a decade has made its way into Silva’s poetics, as seen through her familiarity with subtraction, incongruity and whiteness.

Sofia Silva’s painting is analytical in nature yet features figurative details.

In 2014, the Museo Correr held a milestone exhibition in the artist’s education, The Poetry of Light: it was there that Silva studied several Venetian drawings from the National Gallery of Art in Washington that she had never seen before. Her attention focused more on the neutral space of the papers than on the gouache and hatching: mounts, squaring, ridged margins, folds and impressions of old frames. Today Silva uses canvas as if it were paper, hence the predilection for white. All her paintings are alla prima, in contrast with the collage of fragments from other paintings by Silva that she ‘sacrifices’ to be used in later ones.

Sofia Silva (b. 1990, Padua) holds a BFA in Visual Arts and Theatre (2009-2012), a MA in History of Arts and Preservation of Artistic Heritage (2013-2016) and a BPsych in Techniques and methods in psychological science (2023-2025). In October 2023, she participated in the group exhibition Italian Painting Today (Triennale, Milan). Her latest solo shows are Consolations (Case Chiuse by Paola Clerico, 2023) and Melania pieve mostarda (Una boccata d’arte - Fondazione Elpis, 2024).
In parallel to her painting practice, she has been writing texts on art for ten years for newspapers and catalogues of institutions including La Quadriennale di Roma, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh in Arles, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Wien.
She lives and works in Padua.