Artists

Sophie Reinhold

Press release

“I started a joke that started the whole world crying.”

This confession kicks off the eponymous song by alternative rock band Faith No More, a cover of the Bee Gees original from 1968. What for some is just a simple three-verse song is for others a song about “Jesus on the cross from the Devil’s point of view,” as posted on a Beegees fansite. For others, however, the song’s irony consists of a cathartic realization for both artist and audience about the consequences of a paradoxical reality: “Oh but I didn’t see that the joke was on me. And I started to cry, which started the whole world laughing.” Sophie’s exhibition walks on this exact fine line between comedy and tragedy by stripping naked the Janus-faced, ideological imagery facing the viewer as if to ask: what does it actually mean to depict something realistically? As we have learned from Brecht: “Realism (...) is art’s answer to a world torn apart by contradictions.” High up on the wall, in typical St. Petersburg manner, are picturesque scenes of characters “doing funny business” with one another. Fluctuating between abstract and figurative surfaces, with a compulsory need to represent and be recognized, they reveal humorous and striking vulgarities beyond the reach of the detail-eating eye of a peep show. Her depictions of women are drawn from 1960s Playboy comics—“porn jokes” from which some teenagers and grown-up painters, might draw inspiration from. A supposedly abstract, faceless and naked body with a flowing mane and hard nipples rides passionately on an overwhelmed green figure with terrified bug-eyes and an open mouth. Another body kneels with an empty expression and outstretched arms in front of its greedy green ass-eater: clumsy versions of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Deep Ones,” which nurtured the founding of the modern xenophobic and occasionally misogynistic horror genre.