Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce Spoiled by Freud, Sofia Silva’s first exhibition in the United States.
Autobiographical in nature, Silva’s new paintings are deeply intertwined with her relationship to psychoanalysis. The daughter of two psychoanalysts, Silva has been immersed in the practice since childhood. For Silva, psychoanalysis has become a consistent interpretative lens that informs how she looks at the world. It is an unceasing gaze that alternates between an extreme tolerance of humanity, and an understanding of the intolerance that same humanity is able to enact. This analytic framework translates to an analytic approach to painting, in which images are deconstructed, and reconfigured in constellatory compositions.
Figurative details are dislocated within abstract landscapes, and collaged elements, often physically extracted and repurposed from her previous paintings, dot the surface of her works. Shaped by fields of negative space, Silva’s paintings initially present as fragmentary, though when brought together, they begin to form a deeply intimate narrative that spans two distinct phases of her psychoanalytic journey. Conceived as episodes representing specific moments in her life, Silva’s paintings move from the tensions of her youth, to the anxieties of adulthood, illness, nostalgia, and anger, forming distinct stations of a personal Via Crucis. Encouraging the viewer to immerse themselves freely with the origin and content of each work, detailed information sheets are available during the duration of the exhibition.
Writing on Silva’s work, Bice Curiger said: “Sofia Silva is a master of shifting perspectives, where forms hover on the brink of transformation, poised between opposing states. At first, we are reassured by the delicate, the intimate, the ethereal: a quiet counterpoint to ostentatious gesture. Yet as we venture further into her universe, even these certainties dissolve, and we find ourselves holding our breath at the audacity of her grand-scale compositions, with their infinitely subtle tonalities and vast, uncharted voids. As Meret Oppenheim once wrote in a poem: ’with an enormous little, much.’”
Sofia Silva (b. 1990, Padua) lives and works in Padua. Past solo exhibitions of her work include Notizie da lei, Barbati Gallery, Venice, 2025, Melania Pieve Mostarda, Una Boccata d’Arte - Fondazione Elpis, Milan, 2024, and Consolations, Case Chiuse by Paola Clerico, Turin, 2023. Silva received a BFA in Visual Arts and Theater in 2012, and MA in the History of Art and Preservation of Artistic Heritage in 2016, and in 2025, a BPsych in Techniques and Methods of Psychological Science. In addition to her artistic practice, Silva has written extensively on art for the past decade. Her texts have been commissioned by institutions including La Quadriennale di Roma, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, and Kunsthalle Wien.
