SUBLIMITY

Articulate Project Space
Sophia Lee Georgas
SUBLIMITY
04.09 - 27.09

Opening Saturday 5th of September 2-5pm

SUBLIMITY brings together a new body of work that extends Sophia Lee Georgas’ ongoing investigation into the material representations of a utopia, depicted through sacred, spiritual, and monumental sites around the world. Working primarily in paint, Sophia explores how harmonious colours, collage, fragmentation, transcendent forms, geometric compositions, and hard-edged shapes can more directly evoke a sacred realm.

Her process begins with selecting photographs from Western architectural books, magazines, and postcards, as well as material collected from firsthand encounters with religious or monumental sites across Europe, Australia, and Asia. Sophia is drawn to images for their particular spatial, formal, or atmospheric qualities. Sophia reimagines the original site by removing the sanctified structure from its dutiful context, thereby embodying the potential for an alternative, nostalgic and futuristic utopia, free from political and religious implications. By reimagining architectural imagery with sacred connotations, Sophia creates a new way of seeing and understanding the paradisiacal through alternative imagery, challenging familiar depictions of the divine realm.

STATEMENT
Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated by the enchantment and blissful aura I sensed in architectural structures dedicated to a higher being or divine essence. I experienced this desirable energy inside sacred and significant Greek Orthodox buildings throughout my life. It has fuelled my fascination and ambition to pursue this phenomenon in art and my own paradisical idealism. Each holy site I visited represented an idealised state through the use of religious elements, manipulating colour, light, space, decoration, and shape in the interior and exterior facades to create a vision of heaven on earth – a utopia. Individually, each experience impacted my psyche, leading me to pursue how a visual representation of a painting can imbue a spiritual realm encompassing our aspirations, fantasies and desires, or delusions. I continue to search for that excellence in aesthetic forms and idealistic spaces, transforming the symbolic, formal, and devotional elements in a place of worship into my paradisical representation in painting. My artworks are based on photographs of existing architectural spaces that I believe retain an overwhelming divine and god-like presence.

BIOGRAPHY
Sophia Lee Georgas is a visual artist living and working in Sydney, Australia. Sophia attributes her art practice to her fixation on architectural structures dedicated to higher beings from her transpersonal experiences as a child in Greek Orthodox churches. She attempts to render these buildings into painterly ‘thought forms’ as their perfectly aesthetic and idealistic forms are transformed into symbolic elements on her canvas. Vast cavernous spaces, altars and pulpits are rendered in colourful geometric shapes, yet their fragmentation offers an alternate view of these sacred spaces. Dream-like in quality, Sophia’s works offer an alternative scene, one filled with the imperfections of reality. Graduating with a Master of Fine Art from the National Art School, Sydney in 2021, Sophia Lee Georgas was awarded the British School of Rome Residency 2023 and selected for a solo exhibition at Orange Regional Gallery as part of The Seed Exhibition 2024. Sophia has been selected as a finalist in the Lloyd Rees Emerging Artist Award and Flanagan Art Prize in 2025, the Georges River Art Prize in 2023, the Waverley Art Award and Fisher’s Ghost Art Award in 2022, the Grace Cossington Smith Art Award in 2021, and the Clyde & Co Art Award in 2020.