Sofia Laskari is a London-based figurative painter and University of the Arts London graduate whose work has gained growing recognition across the UK and internationally. In 2023, she was named UK New Artist of the Year, becoming the youngest-ever recipient of the Robert Walters award held at Saatchi Gallery. Selected from more than 1,600 entrants, the award marked a major turning point in her early career.

In 2024, Laskari presented her debut solo exhibition, Body and Flesh, at Saatchi Gallery, bringing together a substantial body of figurative work focused on the female body, vulnerability and identity. The exhibition was extended beyond its original run and established her as one of the most distinctive young figurative voices emerging from London at the time.

Her career has since continued across exhibitions, awards, television and publications. She has participated in Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year, exhibited at Woman in Art Fair and the London Biennale, won the Beyond Future Art Prize 2024, and has been featured in international art and culture publications. Her work has also entered private collections in the UK and abroad.

In 2026, Laskari returned to Saatchi Gallery with Double Nature, her largest painting to date, presented as part of ArtEvol’s A View from Everywhere. At 200 × 270 cm, the work reflects the increasing scale and ambition of her practice and marks another significant chapter in her ongoing relationship with the gallery.

Alongside exhibitions, Laskari maintains an independent studio practice spanning large-scale oil painting, portraiture, drawing and more experimental interventions. Her work continues to attract interest from private collectors, galleries and curators internationally.

Sofia Laskari

Exhibitions/ publications

Photograph by: Tom Morley

Artist Statement

My work begins with emotion, personal experience and the need to translate something internal into a visible form. I often use my own features and body as a recurring character, but I don’t consider these works straightforward self-portraits. The figure becomes a way of speaking about vulnerability, identity, memory, femininity and different emotional states without the work being limited to autobiography.

A large part of my practice is also concerned with how women are represented. I’m interested in showing the female body from a female perspective and questioning ideas that have become culturally normalised — particularly around beauty, desirability, perfection and the expectation that women should be visually pleasing. I want the body in my work to feel human rather than idealised: changing, imperfect, emotional and shaped by experience.

I work primarily in oil and build my paintings very intuitively. I rarely rely on fixed colour formulas, especially when painting skin. Instead, I work slowly with small brushes, placing colour in fragments and allowing one mark to lead to another. Exposed canvas, drawing, unfinished areas and visible traces of process often remain within the final work. I like the viewer to be able to sense that the painting began as a blank surface and gradually came into existence.

More recently, I have become increasingly interested in larger scale, pattern, looser marks, childlike scribbles and physical interventions into the surface itself. These elements allow the work to move further away from traditional ideas of a fully polished painting and give me more freedom to respond physically and instinctively.

Ultimately, I see my practice as a continuous visual record rather than a series of separate chapters. The paintings document emotional moments, thoughts and experiences as they happen, almost like fragments of an ongoing diary. I don’t try to prescribe what the viewer should feel. If a work creates an emotional response — comfort, discomfort, sadness, recognition, tension, or something harder to name — then for me it has succeeded.

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