Take Care of Yourself / Sophie Treppendahl / 2023

“These paintings, all of them, are essentially me collaging together a bunch of sentimental things […] every object in this painting has a story, and through the process of making this was puzzling together the stories of my life […] it’s this play between content and color.” – Sophie Treppendahl

A recent exhibition at the Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles featured the work of New Orleans-based painter Sophie Treppendahl. Treppendahl’s practice is afield from the poles of the High Art world, growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, going to school there, and continuing to live and work in the South today. Her paintings typically take the domestic spaces of her own home and studio as the subject matter; she fills those spaces with useful and meaningful objects and then presents them to us as room-sized still lifes.

The paintings presented at Take Care of Yourself continue that process, and reflect on the little moments of self-care in the space of the home. Treppendahl acknowledges that this theme of self-care was prompted by her sense of loss of youth (turning thirty) and her own mental health journey. The title of the show, Take Care, nods at the common Southern farewell, and Treppendahl names many of her paintings with similar playful imperatives. This series was mostly painted in 2022. At first glance, the paintings may seem detached from the outside world. But, inspection of the objects which Treppendahl includes hint at the wider, very political world beyond: media, newspapers, The New Yorker, and the date of the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. With such details, we feel her domesticity – however cozy – is never totally sheltered form events. In fact, the home-life scenes she paints are still loaded with a latent pandemic-lockdown feeling.

The paintings are reproduced below from the Philip Martin Gallery website, and with information on Treppendahl sourced from the Gallery, her Instagram, her personal website, and an interview between her and Martin on the occasion of the Take Care show: