Sophie Birch

Sophie Birch’s practice explores ideas of potential and emergence, unfolding and becoming, and how sensorial and emotional perceptions are continuously shifting. She creates diffused, glowing atmospheres that are suspended in an in-between space, at the same time familiar, yet slightly beyond grasp, suggesting a push and pull between softness and containment, and the mingling of inner and outer states. A recurring image in Birch’s work is the one of an open book or a double-page spread: the open pages play with the tension between image, depth and surface, creating both a pictorial surface and an emotional portal. She often references images, graphs and didactic illustrations of science, anatomy and biology books, building on her observations and weaving connections with her own archive of sketches and photographs, as well as lived experience.

Sophie Birch (b. 1992, Littlehampton, UK) lives and works in London, UK. She holds a BA in Fine Art: Painting from the Wimbledon College of Art, London (2014) and completed The Drawing Year at The Royal Drawing School, London (2019). Recent solo and two person exhibitions include 'Figures of Speech’, Alice Amati, London, UK (2025) and ‘Twofold Vision’, Baert Gallery, Los Angeles (2024). Her work has been exhibited in group shows in the UK and internationally at venues including The Painting Rooms, London, UK (2025); Grimm Gallery, NYC, US (2025); Melzi Fine Art, Milan, Italy (2024); Staffordshire Street Gallery, London, UK (2024); Calcio Gallery, London, UK (2023); Arusha Contemporary, London, UK (2023); Arusha Contemporary, New York, US (2023); Andrea Festa Fine Art, Rome (2023); Unit 1 Gallery, London, UK (2023); dARTS, Paynes Wharf, London, UK (2022); Terrace Gallery, London, UK (2022); 11 Sydney Mews, London, UK (2022) and Yorkton Workshops, London, UK (2022). Birch completed the artist residency at Domus Nostra in Rome, Italy in October 2025 and previously participated in the Dumfries House Residency in Scotland in 2023. In 2022, she was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize.