Sophie Vanhomwegen

bio

Sophie Vanhomwegen (b. 1988, Brussels, Belgium) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brussels. Her practice explores the intersection of the familiar and the surreal, frequently deconstructing media imagery to challenge modern perceptions of reality and the human gaze.

After obtaining a Master’s degree in Media Arts at the School of Arts in Ghent, she completed a two-year postgraduate program in Transmedia at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. This program focused on hybrid art forms. There, she pursued both practical and theoretical research into how images are constructed through formal principles of composition, pleasing the senses while shaping a specific way of looking. 

Sophie cultivates a visual sensitivity that renders her acutely aware of the power images hold: how they seduce, manipulate, and shape perception. This awareness led her to begin collecting advertising magazines and printed matter, cutting into their seductive surfaces and reassembling fragments into new compositions. From 2012, her practice shifted toward a more analog approach, driven by a need for materiality after years of working exclusively on screen. 

Her early collages are defined by surgical precision and graphic simplicity, qualities that have remained central to her work. The graphic simplicity is a conscious choice, a reaction against the overload of images in popular media. It became her way to strip away the noise, to create space within the visual chaos. The meticulous precision, too, is not arbitrary. It reflects the sickening impact these idealized images have on women : the pressure to conform, to modify or obsessively adjust one's body to meet impossible standards. The act of cutting becomes a metaphor for the interventions women are led to perform on themselves, both physically and psychologically, in a desperate attempt to align with the images they are fed.

Her works immediately establish an ambiguity. An analog collage can easily be mistaken for a digital construction, just as a digital construction can easily be mistaken for a real representation. So what are we looking at ? In a way, she reverses the equation, questioning what we accept as real. But the engagement with these materials is never solely technical. The magazines she sources are filled with hyper-idealized female bodies, images that present a specific, objectified vision of women. For Sophie, encountering these unrealistic representations is deeply unsettling, especially the way women, particularly young women, are sexualized and reduced to narrow criteria of value. This felt shocking then, and remains so now. Her work becomes a way of reappropriating these images, of reclaiming them from the machinery that produced them.

Since 2020, her work has taken a significant formal turn: painting began to layer onto digital prints, resulting in deliberately ambiguous hybridisations. These works, at the crossroads of the pictorial and the digital, question the classical hierarchy of media. This challenge to conventions finds a spatial extension in her most recent production: her images break free from their original format to occupy space in the form of paper sculptures. These three-dimensional installations embody a gentle revolt against normative frameworks, while continuing a coherent reflection on visual ambiguity and the reconditioning of the gaze.