HANDFUL OF SPRING: Violeta Sofia at 5 New Street Square

Violeta Sofia’s work brings the tradition of floral still life into a contemporary photographic language. Historically, many still-life paintings brought together flowers that could never have bloomed at the same time, creating imagined arrangements that existed beyond a single season or moment.Violeta draws on this tradition through theatrical photographs that combine photography and painting. Blurring the boundaries between still life and portraiture, her compositions bring together elaborate floral arrangements, richly textured fabrics, artifacts and saturated colour. Influenced by the visual language of Old Master painting while firmly rooted in the present, the works explore transformation, self-acceptance and the ways different cultural references can coexist within a single image.

The result is a body of work that feels both familiar and unexpected: classical in its visual references, but unmistakably contemporary in its making.