Sophie Thun was born in 1985 in Frankfurt. She lives in Vienna.
For nearly a decade, Sophie Thun has been building a photographic corpus that is both rich and remarkably coherent, exploring the materiality and potential of her medium, the conditions of image production and circulation, the notion of self-portraiture, and the representation of the female body. While photography is the principal tool of her practice, her work is also deeply informed by the vocabularies of performance and installation. Indeed, Thun uses her own body in complex, self-reflective stagings, most often nude and meeting the viewer’s gaze head-on. Positioned both behind and in front of the camera, she blurs the boundaries between author and model, seeing and showing, making and appearing—those very dichotomies that have long structured pictorial and photographic traditions of the female nude.
This sense of ambiguity is heightened by the artist’s ongoing work of multiplying her own figure. Through cutouts and collages, the physical layering of prints (in her studio) or superimpositions (in the darkroom), as well as through photograms that often reveal her hands at life size, Thun’s body unfolds into a network of paradoxical appearances—doubles, reflections, spectral presences.
The artist also pays close attention to the spatial presentation of her work. Large prints that occupy entire walls coexist or overlap with framed photographs; architectural elements of the exhibition space are integrated into or set in dialogue with the images. Through shifts of scale, trompe-l’œil effects, coverings, and acts of concealment, she extends into the exhibition space the same inquiries that take place in the studio and the darkroom: an exploration of the fundamental tension between the photographic image and its object.
Sophie Thun is represented by Galerie Sophie Tappeiner (Vienna).
