Banana Leaves Painting

Sofia Nikolaou was born in Greece. She studied Finance & Economics with a master’s degree in Business Administration. She started painting systematically and passionately for the last 15 years. She attends private painting and drawing lessons since 2017, in order to improve her technique, to experiment with new media and to deepen practically and theoretically in the history of Contemporary Art which is her field of interest. Her visits to museums in Europe and the USA from a young age, as well as her father’s private art collection had a great impact on her. Her work is mainly influenced by her country’s natural landscapes. More specifically, it is influenced by images from the seascape of Greece, close-ups that focus on the reflections of light in the water and almost abstract images from the bottom of the sea. She strives to convey that sense of place by capturing its fleeting moment. She photographs images and processes the material she collects by a series of sketches and drafts. Through this process, abstract images often emerge, giving her the opportunity to explore the relationship between light and shadow above and below the water surface. She works on canvas using mostly acrylics and mixed media, while an important feature of her work is the intense process of the canvas surface with many layers of material. She is experimenting with all the possibilities that her material can offer her. Mainly in her abstracts, new painting qualities are created above the previous ones as a kind of palimpsest painting on the canvas surface. Sofia Nikolaou is in a lively and continuous communication with her paintings, working them over and over again in a constant flow, so that in the end some surfaces become almost embossed. Along with her daily practice in painting, she studies in depth artists who, despite the differences between them, constitute reference and inspiration to her, such as Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Pierre Soulages, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keeffe, Kenton Nelson, Panagiotis Tetsis, Claude Monet, Henri Rousseau, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, David Hockney, etc. Her work may be found in private collections in Greece and abroad.