The Lives We Live

POV contemporary is pleased to present The Lives We Live, an exhibition of portraits by Paris-based artist Sophie Westerlind. The Lives We Live opens on 16.5.2025 and runs through 31.5.2025. This is Westerlind’s first solo exhibition with POV contemporary. The portraiture of Sophie Westerlind is intimate, unguarded, and spontaneous. The worlds depicted in her work foreground her subjects as a sort of cynosure. Echoing the emotionality of Alice Neel as much as the gestural expressivity of London School painters, Westerlind`s renderings of friends and acquaintances—memoried figures from her travels across Europe—not only reflect their immediate surroundings, but also display the mediumistic qualities of painting itself. Across each painting in The Lives We Live, memory becomes a kind of virtual environment. The pensiveness of Cynthia (2025), for instance—the mindful attitude which makes her equally monolithic and porous—is reflected in each gestural marking on canvas. Her likeness is as much a personified image as a kind of spontaneous formalism: a consolidation of memory around imageless details. In this way, The Lives We Live suggests a mosaic of acculturated relations. Nikki e Claudia shows two women playfully embracing on a couch. The intimacy they’re sharing dramatizes an ambiguity redrawn from memory. The gestural nuances that give life to this painting foreground an emotional intensity between how these women appear and the abstract painting featured in the background—an imagistic correspondence reminiscent of Bonnard, where figures and setting echo one another in feeling rather than form. Westerlind’s depictions of friends, friends of friends, and familial bonds sidestep strict genealogies and narrative. Her subjects occupy an ambiguous place between characterization and symbol. Situated in a residential setting (as these paintings are), her work portrays an emotional resonance beyond the visible— reflecting the noise and glimmer, the thoughtfulness and feeling, of moments that come alive only in memory. Sophie Westerlind (b. 1985, Stockholm, Sweden) lives and works in Paris, France. Significant exhibitions in her career include She affects us, indeed (2023) at the Swedish Institute in Rome, Italy; You danced on the carpet and waited for her (2023) at Galerie Norbert Arns, Cologne, Germany; L’ultima cena, Sophie Westerlind su Tintoretto at the Museo Diocesano di Belluno-Feltre, Feltre, Italy; and Yes, I used to be a great dancer (2022) at Spazio NEUTRO, Reggio Emilia, Italy. Most recently, she exhibited at Spazio Berlendis, Marignana Arte, in Venice, Italy.