The London-based painter Sofia Mitsola spoke with the Cambridge art historian Alyce Mahon to mark the launch of her monograph Sisterly Affections.
The London-based painter Sofia Mitsola launched her monograph Sisterly Affections in conversation with the art historian Alyce Mahon at The Hellenic Centre in Marylebone on Thursday 1 October 2026.
Mitsola was born in Thessaloniki in 1992 and trained at the Slade. She took the Tiffany and Co. x Outset Studiomakers Prize in her graduating year, and has since shown at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Fondation Carmignac.
She paints invented women: sphinxes, bathers and figures from Greek and Egyptian myth. They face the viewer against flat geometric grounds, often larger than life, so nothing recedes and the figure meets the viewer’s eye.
In her work the frontal pose is the argument. A sphinx in profile is a decorative motif, while a sphinx painted head-on at scale raises the question of who may look at whom. The ancient sources answer that question differently from the modern ones.
Mahon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Cambridge and a scholar of Surrealism and the politics of eros. Sisterly Affections carries her essay on Mitsola’s work, and the evening marked its publication.