The London-based painter Sofia Mitsola in conversation with the Cambridge art historian Alyce Mahon, marking the launch of her monograph Sisterly Affections.
Sofia Mitsola was born in Thessaloniki in 1992 and trained at the Slade, and she paints invented women: sphinxes, bathers, figures pulled out of Greek and Egyptian myth, set frontally against flat geometric grounds so that the viewer is caught looking and the figure looks back. 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 is one of the few painters of her generation working the classical repertoire without irony.
The frontality is the argument. A sphinx painted in profile is a decorative motif; painted head-on, at scale, holding the viewer’s eye, it becomes a proposition about who is permitted to look at whom, which is the oldest question attached to the female nude and one the ancient sources answer differently from the modern ones. Her figures are often larger than life and the grounds behind them are flat colour, so nothing recedes and there is nowhere for the eye to go but the face.
She appears at the Hellenic Centre on Thursday 1 October 2026 with Alyce Mahon, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Cambridge and a scholar of Surrealism and the politics of eros. The occasion is the launch of Mitsola’s monograph Sisterly Affections, published by DCV, in which Mahon’s essay on her work appears.