I’ve been reading different artist biographies recently, and there’s often this idea of the artist’s loneliness, that being alone in your work is almost inherent to the practice. Do you feel that’s true?
Of course. I think all artists have that, especially with the way we work, with how much time we spend in our own heads. But it’s also beautiful in its own way.
When you start a new work, you wet the surface, the raw, unprimed cotton, and apply pigments directly on it.
I developed that myself. I can’t really call it a technique; it’s simply the quickest and most efficient way to get the image out. I start with this pool of water and pigment and work into it, letting things emerge.
When I first started mixing things—mixing pigments with binders and other things. And when I used oil to bind pigments, I had to use a lot of white spirit and turpentine to thin it, and those thinners were very toxic. The pigments are already quite toxic. The acrylic ones are also toxic—just in a different, “heady” way.
You don’t really sketch, right? You go directly onto the raw canvas. Is it important for you that the result comes fast?
Yes, it’s almost unbearable: this huge canvas that takes so long to prepare physically—and then I go and paint it in very little time. I use so little material, almost nothing. It’s like a gesture, something that happens in that very minute.
No layers, no coming back, more like capturing the moment. So it’s also connected to memory?
I am always asking myself what I can actually hold in my head, what the image is, and how long I can stay with it. That’s the game. Because as soon as you draw something, you are cheating already; the marks help you remember. If you draw a circle, you think, “Yes, that’s the face.” Then you think of an eye, and so on.
I try to paint so quickly that the image feels like it’s appearing and disappearing at the same time.
Do you feel that the limited time spent on each detail or subject is present in all your work?
I make something very quickly, but then I have to live with it for a long time. So it’s fast and slow at the same time. The development and getting used to it is slow.
Tell me about this part of “living with it” after it’s done. For the commission for the Kunsthalle Wien vitrine, you worked with the sixty-two-meter-long canvas. Can you tell us more about the process of working on it and letting it go public?
I can’t really see the whole painting while working because I paint with the canvas lying on the ground. I’ve done it so many times, and I know this moment when I put it up and have a perspective with it hanging. I can translate the image in my head very well, even before that moment happens, so this helps me in the process a lot. Still, I didn’t know exactly how it would look in the vitrine because of the frames that are quite present on each meter.
You are working on the image, and in this case, you also work on the frame repeating itself, becoming part of the image. It’s not your usual presentation of your works. How did you conduct it? Did you make a model of the vitrine to try it out?
I was very conscious of that when painting. I wanted a continuous image, not sixty-two separate ones. One painting with different things happening in it. The frames make it like a film, film sequences, or slides.
Courtesy of the artist, Photo: Markus Wörgötter
I don’t think building a model would have made much difference. I had pieces of paper with the measurements. I knew about the corner, so I wanted something to happen there before it went into the long part. Even though the canvas was rolled out on the floor in my studio, in my head I was already here in front of the vitrine, continuously imagining how it would look.
You were physically in your studio, but mentally you were somewhere else. This made me think back to the film factor, more precisely, of directing the film: you’re in one physical situation, but you’re imagining everything through a camera lens, how it will look later on the actual film. So let’s go directly to the subject matter. Did you decide alone on the concept of how to “proclaim the space,” or was this something that came out of your collaboration with the Kunsthalle Wien team?
It was partly a conversation. I came in June this year and saw the vitrine with Nora Turato’s work in it. I read it like an „Aaaaaaaa…“ in the sense of „Ah, I understand.“ Only later, I realized that it’s meant as a scream. And then, because of the way it sits on the outside of the institution, this idea came to me: wrap your head around it.
Years ago, I remembered I had worked with Michelle Cotton on one exhibition, and I painted English idioms—literally- for this show. So if the idiom was “as the crow flies,” or “having a field day,” or “the grass is greener on the other side,” I painted exactly that; I painted greener grass on the other side. And this time I thought to keep the idiom as the title. So that is how Get Your Head Around It became the title.
I tried to paint understanding. This led me to epistemology. And then I remembered that I had been a student of Oswald Wiener, who wrote a lot about systems theory, artificial intelligence, and the question, „What is thinking?“ What is understanding? A big part of his seminars was Selbstbeobachtung (self-observing). We did a task together at university. He told us that we were supposed to look inside ourselves and describe what we could actually see. The point is to try to answer, can you imagine something not tied to your own perspective? Can you really hold an inner image? His argument was always that you couldn’t. And I was always trying to prove I could.
For example, the full moon. If you close your eyes and think of the moon, do you really see it as if you’re standing there looking at it? Or is it something else?
Let me try. So I imagine the moon from my perspective. And I can see it, but then my imagination brings in other things, someone walking in, something happening… It changes.
The inner image dissolves. You can’t hold it. And this is interesting when you compare human understanding to machine understanding.
With artificial intelligence, when you give a machine a complicated mathematical formula, it gets it completely. Whereas even great mathematicians might have different images in their heads when they talk about the same formula. We communicate with words, but we don’t really understand each other fully. Computers, however, always understand each other completely.
Do you think this has to do with the fact that we all “live” with different “truths,” different inputs, different backgrounds, and different days?
Yes. We can make it almost the same, but even a tiny difference in our existence changes it.
In this sense, the way the vitrine works, that you can’t see the whole painting at once, is connected to this idea?
Absolutely. It’s a good way to make the point. You can never see the whole. You always see fragments. Physically and conceptually.
What about the figurative elements we see in the painting—the birds, swans, faces, people, and nature? It feels like you always return to similar motifs in your work, and this time as well. How do you come to them?
Get Your Head Around. It had a lot to do with the scale. I wanted it to be one painting; I stretched things out. I started deliberately with the three primary colors—yellow, red, and blue—and everything else came from that.
Light and dark came first: the first recognition of something being there or not there. Then figures started to appear, dancing, moving. Faces. Life. Then animals, fish, and birds, because so much of our understanding of the world comes from studying the world.
Courtesy of the artist, photo: Markus Wörgötter
The dolphin jumped out because I wanted startling images — something that comes at you very clearly. The peacock needed to be in a movement of arresting, stopping. Then the planets: the sun, the earth, the moon, and some stars, realizing the earth is the earth only through its relation to the sun. Then plants. Then people. And then everything happens quickly: the invention of the wheel, being alive, and Allegory of the Cave by Plato; people sitting, watching dancing shadows until they walk out of the cave and see the world.
Do you feel that the current discourse in, let’s say, the last ten or fifteen years is too closed? That visual art is feeding its own system rather than pushing social boundaries or offering new perspectives on technology, for example?
To some degree, yes, art has to feed the system so you can make the next thing. Practically, you need that support. And often you’re speaking to a small audience. But occasionally something breaks open and reaches further. Then it becomes relevant for more people, and it does what it’s meant to do, which is to change things by existing. I still believe art has that capacity, even if it often looks like it’s circling itself. That is why we need institutions. When you work within an institution, you feel that what you do has a purpose beyond the bubble. More questions open up. It’s not just your own small circle.
I also feel that without the “safe bubble,” the intimacy of two people talking, or the small collective, the work couldn’t exist in the same way. If everything were always immediately open to the general public, we’d lose something essential.
Exhibitions give people a chance to see something that’s been worked on for years. That’s important.
What does your working rhythm look like? Are you in the studio every day? Do you have a ritual?
I’m there every day. Before, I was there alone, but I have an assistant in the studio now as well. I also teach at the university. Teaching forces me to verbalize what I otherwise only know intuitively. It gives me a kind of verbal understanding of my practice. It’s very good for that; you’re pushed to formulate things more clearly.
And when you’re painting, what’s the atmosphere in the studio? Do you listen to music, or do you prefer silence?
I don’t listen to music anymore. It defines the space too much.
When I’m painting, I want to inhabit a different, imaginative space, not one that’s already shaped by music. So I prefer silence.
Why do you think the large formats stayed with you? How do you see that relationship?
I just like it. It’s a bit ridiculous to have such a big canvas to work with, and that appeals to me. Large canvases immediately create a space; you paint something, hang it, and it dominates the room. You can walk into it. When I paint on that scale, I feel like I’m inside the work, moving around it, almost dancing with the canvas. But I also enjoy painting in small-scale; both scales have their own logic.
Exhibition: Sophie von Hellermann – Get Your Head Around It
Duration: 8 October 2025 – 29 March 2026
Address: Kunsthalle Wien, Museum Platz 1, 1070 Wien
More about the exhibition: www.kunsthallewien.at
Sophie von Hellermann – www.instagram.com/sophievonhellermann/
Sophie von Hellermann (born in Munich, 1975) is a German-born painter based in London and Margate, known for her dream-like, narrative canvases that mix pigment with water to create soft, lyrical washes. She studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Royal College of Art, and since 2022 has been a Professor of Painting at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe.