For many artists and collectors today, especially those who have chosen a path that questions or rejects the primacy of Marcel Duchamp’s once anarchic conceptualism or the cultural profundity of Pop Art, the long shadow of abstract sculptors from Jean Arp and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to Donald Judd and Carl Andre has endorsed an aesthetic of formal ‘purity’ that requires to be ‘uncontaminated’ by reference to the human condition. Such utopian abstraction, however, is only one connecting line between modernist pioneers and twenty-first century practice. Alongside it exists that other, equally significant pathway, that of sculptors Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore, or painters Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso who move freely between two and three-dimensional expression.These artists maintain the human subject as the significant core of their practice, allowing the rigors of geometry to create an infrastructure that modifies and strengthens their experiments with bodily form. Brancusi, for example, carved human features as low curved relief planes just lifting out of pure ovoid shapes, while Matisse simplified his figures into either fluent contour curves or cutout silhouettes emphasizing the elasticity of the human body. Sophie works within this tradition, generalizing her slightly elongated but muscular human figures into planar or flowing forms who are certainly not recognisable individuals – their small heads contain no facial features – but are unmistakeably gendered, and engaged in a huge range of interactions: dancing, wrestling, fighting, kissing, banging their heads together, in step and out of step. Hers is very much a contemporary project, but one rooted in knowledge of the universalizing values of classicism through her background in art history. The simplicities of the male figure, for example, suggest the hard geometrical outlines and broad-shouldered proportions of an archaic Greek kouros. And the spaces between couples as defined in her drawings relate to those of her non- representational sculptural assemblages where she shifts abstract forms into strange and unexpected juxtapositions: sundered apart or re-united in a different spatial context.