Sofia Petrov
Sofia Petrov was born in 1980 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, into a family of musicians and intellectuals who filled their apartment with classical music, heated philosophical debates, and a reverence for beauty in all its forms. Her mother was a concert pianist and her father a literature professor specializing in Russian Symbolist poetry — an aesthetic movement defined by its belief that art should transcend the material world and express deeper, ineffable truths. Sofia absorbed this sensibility completely, and it remains the philosophical foundation of everything she creates.
She studied painting at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts, one of Russia's oldest and most rigorous art institutions, where she received a classical training in drawing, color theory, and the Old Masters. But Sofia felt constrained by figuration and representation — she was drawn to abstraction, to the idea that pure color and form could carry emotional and spiritual weight without depicting anything recognizable. After graduating, she moved to Moscow, then Berlin, and finally settled in Paris in 2007, where she has lived and worked ever since.
Paris liberated Sofia. Immersed in the legacy of the French color field painters and in conversation with a diverse community of international artists, she began developing the large-scale abstract paintings that have made her internationally celebrated. Her process is intensely physical and meditative — she works on enormous canvases laid flat on the floor of her studio, pouring, brushing, and wiping translucent layers of paint in long, slow sessions that she describes as "a kind of moving prayer." The finished works are breathtaking: fields of luminous, shifting color that seem to vibrate and breathe, drawing viewers into a state of contemplative absorption.
Sofia Petrov was born in 1980 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, into a family of musicians and intellectuals who filled their apartment with classical music, heated philosophical debates, and a reverence for beauty in all its forms. Her mother was a concert pianist and her father a literature professor specializing in Russian Symbolist poetry — an aesthetic movement defined by its belief that art should transcend the material world and express deeper, ineffable truths. Sofia absorbed this sensibility completely, and it remains the philosophical foundation of everything she creates.
She studied painting at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts, one of Russia's oldest and most rigorous art institutions, where she received a classical training in drawing, color theory, and the Old Masters. But Sofia felt constrained by figuration and representation — she was drawn to abstraction, to the idea that pure color and form could carry emotional and spiritual weight without depicting anything recognizable. After graduating, she moved to Moscow, then Berlin, and finally settled in Paris in 2007, where she has lived and worked ever since.
Paris liberated Sofia. Immersed in the legacy of the French color field painters and in conversation with a diverse community of international artists, she began developing the large-scale abstract paintings that have made her internationally celebrated. Her process is intensely physical and meditative — she works on enormous canvases laid flat on the floor of her studio, pouring, brushing, and wiping translucent layers of paint in long, slow sessions that she describes as "a kind of moving prayer." The finished works are breathtaking: fields of luminous, shifting color that seem to vibrate and breathe, drawing viewers into a state of contemplative absorption.
THE ARTIST'S WORK
