Sophie Cape

Sophie Cape is a Sydney-based painter. Since graduating from the National Art School in 2011, Sophie Cape has become recognised as a contemporary Australian artist.

Prior to her art career, Cape was a distinguished athlete in both downhill skiing and sprint cycling for Australia. After years of sport-related injuries, she redirected her focus into art.

Cape’s practice engages the body and the natural environment, exploring themes of survival, decay, and the human condition.

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, the work of Sophie Cape straddles the sublime with a cathartic expulsion of energy. Her works are vast in scale and performative in their execution. Visceral and dramatic, harking back to her past as an elite and damaged athlete, Cape engages directly with body’s physicality to render an instinctual and emotional act of expression.

Working outside in collaboration with the elements, free from constraints, using unconventional mediums and revelling in their gross materiality, Cape excavates her unconscious in the desire to rip the figure and face wide open. These works are psychological self-portraits, voicing the dialogue between the internal and external landscape, and of past and present experience.

Sophie Cape has held multiple solo exhibitions and won several prestigious art prizes, including Hadley's Art Prize, the Portia Geach Memorial Award and the Paddington Art Prize. She has also been awarded residencies in Paris, Rome, Austria, Poland, Hong Kong, China, Italy, and throughout Australia. In 2020, she was featured on Australian Story and is currently represented in numerous corporate and private collections both locally and internationally.

'SOPHIE CAPE' (OCT 2025)