Almost like the rapidly fading recollections of a dream, Sophie von Hellermann’s paintings capture the otherwise intangible sensation of a fleeting moment held in the mind’s eye. Her works are semi-figurative, containing painterly vignettes rendered with a lyrical, light touch that appear almost to swim in a swirling sea of pastel pinks, greens, and blues. Her subject matter borrows from her own life, history, myth, and literature, intertwining these references into wondrous scenes that pull us out of our drab realities.
“The paintings are tinted with emotion. It helps to communicate emotions to make something more vivid or warmer,” von Hellermann explained of her fanciful compositions’ signature color palette during a recent conversation.
Von Hellermann’s lush canvases have earned attention at exhibitions and art fairs across Europe and the U.S. over the past few years. At Frieze London, in 2023, her presentation with Pilar Corrias was a critical favorite. At this installation, and in several of her gallery shows, her work has taken on an immersive aspect, too, with her characteristic brushstroke leaping off the canvas onto the walls, carpet, or ceiling. At her solo exhibition “Monumental” at Wentrup Gallery earlier this year, she brought her gauzy visions to the walls and columns of the space, creating an almost encompassing park-like effect.
Von Hellermann, who is German but lives in the U.K., produces her impressive but playful canvases out of her main studio in the coastal town of Margate. Since 2022, she has also been working as a professor of painting at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe.
Her paintings may be effusive, but von Hellermann herself is startlingly dry, or perhaps shy. Unlike most artists, she does not seem to enjoy speaking about her practice and steers well clear of offering elaboration or anecdote.
Sophie von Hellermann, Faerie Queen (it is thy dear) (2020). Photo courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias.
Born in Munich in 1975, von Hellermann grew up in the city of Essen and later near Oxford in England. “I always liked looking at art,” she said of her teenage years. “I liked cartoons a lot.” Her mother, an art historian, took the family to museums.
Von Hellermann returned to Germany in the mid-1990s to earn her BFA at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, where she chose to specialize in painting. “It was always the most immediate thing for me,” she explained. Her fluid, sensuous style emerged naturally, enhanced by mixing her pigments with lots of water. “If I see a painting I did 30 years ago, there’s a recognizable line that’s been there all along,” she said.
The paintings’ sense of spontaneity is a true reflection of the speed at which von Hellermann works. “It’s fast painting,” she said. “I need to have an image quickly.”
Sophie von Hellermann, Don’t play with me because you’re playing with fire (2021). Photo courtesy of Pilar Corrias.
After moving to London to complete an MFA at the Royal College of Art, von Hellermann took initiative in organizing group shows. “That was the idea, you make paintings for them to be seen,” she explained of her motivation.
After graduating in 2001, she began showing with a friend’s gallery Vilma Gold in the East London neighborhood of Shoreditch. In 2004, she earned representation with Greene Naftali in New York. In the past few years, her profile has continued to rise. In 2018, she had her first show at Pilar Corrias in London, and, in 2019, she joined Wentrup in Berlin.
Institutional recognition has followed, with works by von Hellermann entering the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Cranford Collection in London. Naturally, von Hellermann’s market has been growing alongside, with an auction record of CNY 1,150,000 ($170,441) set at Holly’s International auction house in Beijing in July 2022. Of her works that have headed to auction since 2020, most sold for between $5,000 and $15,000. On the primary market, however, her mid-sized paintings are priced at around £30,000 ($40,000) and are a hit with collectors.
Pilar Corrias, Frieze London 2023. Photo: courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
At last year’s Frieze London, Pilar Corrias presented a solo booth of new work by von Hellermann, inspired by the iconic Dreamland amusement park in Margate. The artist created a fantastical version of the park, which she made gaudily picturesque, with a warm pink and orange sky reminiscent of J.M.W. Turner’s seascapes. In other works, faintly outlined but boldly colorful characters get lost in a hall of mirrors or go for a ride on the merry-go-round. Swathes of blue, purple, and orange color spilled across the booth’s walls and even pooled out over the carpet.
Part of what makes von Hellerman’s works so engaging—besides their vibrant palettes—are their contemporary twists on art historical precedents. She named German Expressionists like Kirchner and Otto Müller as particularly important influences. “How they were always so present was so important to me,” she said. She also looks to the work of Turner, Munch, and Picasso, as well as Goya and the Rococo painters.
These artists’ tried and true compositional devices are adapted to the considerable scope of von Hellermann’s ideas and references. For her exhibition “Genius” at Greene Naftali in New York last year, she grappled with the loaded and often outdated implications of those deemed “geniuses” in a challenge for herself. She decided to start out by making tiny paintings that would grow each time until she was producing paintings that felt “ridiculously big.” The works poke fun at tropes of the masculine prodigy, starting with a miniature of a woman lighting a match, a metaphor for inspiration, and ending with a female reincarnation of the composer Gustav Mahler.
Sophie von Hellermann, Dandelion (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias.
“Sometimes there’s something very specific I’m trying to communicate and there is a story,” she said. “Other times it’s much more open or vague.” She continued: “I have a hope or vision, an idea… It’s never 100 percent how I imagined it. Successful paintings are those where it all comes together. The moment, the materials, the light, and the idea. I bring everything into play and then it works and is communicated on the canvas.”
Behind a whimsical surface, von Hellermann often investigates darker and more urgent themes. After Britain decided to leave the European Union, much of her work took on a lightly political bent. “I was quite filled with emotions,” she explained. “I did make quite a few paintings about Britain as an island and about Europe.”
At other times, however, threads of inspiration can arrive out of the blue. One painting, Dandelion (2023), was inspired by an episode of the podcast Outrage + Optimism about the women-led environmental campaign, Project Dandelion. “I think it’s a great image, the thought of women all together achieving something,” said von Hellermann. “So I painted a group of women dancing. Almost like I’m proclaiming something.” Dandelion was presented at Art Basel by Pilar Corrias in 2023.
Mural by Sophie von Hellermann in “All Things Become Islands Before my Senses” in Leros, Greece. Photo: Daniel Covadlo, courtesy of Perasma.
One of von Hellermann’s latest projects is the group show by Perasma “All Things Become Islands Before My Senses” in a neoclassical villa on the Greek island of Leros, for which she made a hand-painted mural running up the stairs.
In her next major institutional showing, “Biographies of Modern Art: Collectors and Their Works” at the Brücke Museum in Berlin, von Hellerman’s work will be alongside some of the very historical works that have inspired her. Here, von Hellermann is preparing a new mural to celebrate eight Jewish collectors who were pivotal in heralding the arrival of Expressionism and artists, like Kircher and Müller, whose legacies continue to inspire von Hellermann to this day.