Frieze London 2023

Pilar Corrias is delighted to showcase a solo presentation of work by Sophie von Hellermann at this year's Frieze London. Dreamland, Margate’s iconic funfair, is the inspiration behind a new body of work, featuring carousels, Ferris wheels and soothsayers. Opening in 1870 as a ‘pleasure garden’ set within the coastal resort of Margate, where the artist lives and works, Dreamland has become a symbol of classic British seaside culture: bawdy revelry, tongue-in-cheek humour, decaying grandeur and sepia-tinted sentimentality.

Bringing the funfair to the art fair, von Hellermann builds a carnival populated by a menagerie of characters from literature and popular culture: bathers frolic, seagulls swoop across swirling, Turner-esque skies, and lovers embrace in shadowy corners of the Victorian seafront shelter where TS Eliot wrote his classic work, The Waste Land (1922). Unburdened by the gravities of everyday life, Dreamland’s thrill-seekers begin to sprout wings, or career off into new phantasmic landscapes. In one painting, a group ride tiny cups down an eerie, rainbow-hued river; elsewhere a visitor to a house of mirrors dances and flirts with his own reflections.

As in Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing (1767–8), a painting that epitomises the playfulness and joie de vivre of its era, von Hellermann deliberately reclaims a host of clichés associated with pleasure, frivolity and a temporary loss of control. In her rapidly executed tableaux, von Hellermann fuses the trivial and the grandiose, playing with traditional rules of seriousness and propriety in painting.