Sarah Frances Dias Collaboration With The Smallest Gallery in Soho

We are proud to announce that we will be collaborating with The Smallest Gallery in Soho and Sarah Frances Dias for an exclusive art installation titled 'Integration' for Cultural Style Week this May.

The Smallest Gallery in Soho (est. 2016) is a historic shop-front that faces onto Dean Street, in the heart of Soho. This intimate gallery aims to display artwork that captures people’s attention on their journey through Soho and encourages them to stop, think and be inspired. It hopes to transcend the rapid changes of building developments and the dispersion of the creative cohort — that was once so vibrant within the area — by exhibiting free and engaging artworks to view from the street. The Gallery is run by Philip Levine and Andreia Costa with support from The Garage Soho.

Doctor Sarah Frances Dias, is an architect, artist and researcher in aesthetics who explores (both theoretically and practically) the links between significance and consciousness in art. Born in Oxford, she is currently based between Lisbon and Madeira Island, her hometown. Educated at the Faculty of Architecture of the Technical University of Lisbon, with various art and architecture fields of study. She holds a Bachelor degree (in architecture), Masters degree (creation and conceptual development), Specialization Course (sacred art and architecture) and Doctorate Degree concluded with distinction, at the end of 2017, from the Faculty of Architecture of the Technical University of Lisbon, with her research theme being ’Core Vales and Principles as Generators of Significance in Architecture, Painting and Sculpture’. With numerous publications in various international peer-reviewed conferences and journals, Sarah’s research is infused into her artwork as she explores the dialogues between poetical narrations, mythology, emotion, allegories and archetypes. Sarah’s work has been exhibited in multiple solo and collective exhibitions in various places around Portugal, Europe and in the Emirates, where she lived for a year. Her artwork is part of numerous prominent art collections throughout Europe, both private and public.

Sarah’s paintings and drawings can be best described as a combination of traditional approaches to image-making along with a contemporary perspective; combining the accuracy, delicacy and beauty of Representational Traditional European Painters with the sharp eye, rigor and abstraction of the Contemporary world, especially the precision of photography. Sarah advocates for universality, speaking through compositions that aim to reunite opposing worlds and recombine perspectives. Exploring the dialogues between poetical narrations, mythology, emotion, allegories and archetypes, the works combine multiple references and cross-cultural symbols/archetypes (such as the symbol of the eye or the sphere). Reframing techniques, recomposing vocabularies that speak to the universal aspects of what it means to be human, it is a human story that is being told. She is deeply influenced by the works of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Rembrandt and Auguste Rodin, all of which she has studied profoundly over the years, especially during her Doctorate research. For Sarah, the artistic process itself (which for her is as important as the result), has the aim of portraying luminosity, depth and dimensionality to the subject while at the same time containing and revealing properties of light, laws of form and codes of proportion, in such a way that reality itself is echoed and created.

In Sarah’s eyes, the artist is a scientist in an ever-evolving experimental discovery, and each work is always open-ended, mutating and growing, day by day, organic and natural, as everything else in nature itself.

More details about the art installation will be announced soon.