I and the Village: Sophie Charalambous

‘Around me, the peaceful town.  The milky sky, dark blue, is a little bluer to the left and from above glows a divine happiness’ — Marc Chagall My Life (1923)

I and the Village presents a sequence of new paintings by London-based British-Cypriot artist Sophie Charalambous. The paintings — large-scale gouache and watercolour on hand-made Khadi paper — evoke the cycle of life in the Cyprus of Charalambous' imagination: the turning seasons and the time-worn rituals. They are images that combine the allusive strands of memory and dream with the hard-won riches of close observation.

The exhibition takes its title from a painting by Marc Chagall. Like Chagall, Charalambous creates her own complete and personal world of stoic villagers, inquisitive goats, transitory birds, flowering cacti and abundant trees. The artist has also been inspired by drawing directly from Le Quattro Volte (2010), a poetic documentary-style film about a rural village in Italy. The film’s cinematic composition, structure and storytelling have informed this latest body of work