On January 9, 2026, Sofia Christodoulou opens her solo painting exhibition at Marginalia Gallery in Nicosia. Sophia Christodoulou was born in the island’s capital in 1998. She studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts under Aristotelis Tzakos and graduated with honors in 2022.

Sofia presents a series of works at Marginalia Gallery, which move between motifs and shapes of her own invention. Shapes that have the air of a complete form and inspire something deeper within her. Her work is characterized by soft to intense colors, which exude a spiritual dimension and at the same time conceal a dynamism, leaving room for the mind to wander, carrying the body along with it. Through colors and a repetitive process, she externalizes her desire to experience calm and serenity. By erasing and repainting, she expresses her goal and desire for completion. Each painting is a personal note, an attempt to capture the moment when the eyes meet the soul. The artist explores the relationship between gesture and structure through the use of stencils and oil paints as her main medium. For her, this process is a way to balance the controlled and the unpredictable.

As she characteristically notes, “the stencil is a system that guides us. At the same time, through it, small deviations, mistakes, random points arise; that is where the truth of the process lies, in the end, the truth of being.” Her painting is not about movement or composition, but about the process itself—the continuous act of repeating, removing, and reapplying color to the surface. The material of oil paint, with its weight and physical presence, takes on a decisive role. Each layer of color functions as a moment, a feeling, a state, which characterizes and defines the entire work. To use her own words again, “each layer of paint is a different mental moment. The process of layering is like a conversation with ourselves—sometimes calm, sometimes restless, but always true.”

In this way, the material becomes a vehicle for meaning. The oil, the stencil, the imprint, and the erasure compose an internal mapping of time, contemplation, silence, and our very existence. These are not images that seek to narrate something external, but rather records of the artist’s own spiritual experience.