sophie FRIEDMAN-PAPPAS

Last week of “Department” at @paulsoto_net in New York! Thank you Paul and thank you all!

“Meet you in hell!” is a variable loop of Rembrandt’s coil finding himself in bad interlocutors - Henry Clay Frick, Thomas Kaplan, and Julius Langbehn - on view in Greater New York @momaps1 Thank you so much to @jody_graf and Andrea Sanchez

My show, “Department” is open at @paulsoto_net is open for another month! P.s. thanks to all that came out to see Greater New York this week — my show at Paul’s is working through a lot of the same stuff, differently. Make sure to catch both 🤍

Sophie Friedman-Pappas / Greater New York 2026 @momaps1 PAUL SOTO is thrilled to congratulate Sophie Friedman-Pappas, who is included in “Greater New York 2026,” which opens tomorrow at MoMA PS1 and runs through August 17, 2026. Greater New York 2026 brings into focus over 50 multidisciplinary artists in the formative years of their careers. This highly anticipated iteration will encompass site-specific commissions, new productions, and performances, alongside important recent works that address today’s most urgent cultural concerns. Organized for the first time by MoMA PS1’s full curatorial team, the exhibition emphasizes the forces that shape daily life in the city today, as well as strategies of resistance and adaptation in the face of increased surveillance, economic precarity, and shifting technologies. “Greater New York 2026” registers an optimism and anxiety generated through artists’ attention to the layered, lived textures of New York City.   “In a new work for “Greater New York 2026”, “Meet you in hell!” (2026), Friedman-Pappas builds on the themes of her Buda’s horse triptych by taking up the figure of Henry Clay Frick, an anti-labor industrialist now best known for his art collection. The stop-motion animation follows a self-portrait by Rembrandt, acquired by Frick in 1906, looking for missing pieces of itself. Friedman-Pappas’s work concurrently considers the figures of the robber baron and the artist, both which embody historically contingent ideas of the individual. Mutually implicating these models of the self through the portrait’s journey of self-consolidation, Friedman-Pappas surfaces contradictions around difference and identity which underpin many of modernity’s economic and political projects.” –MoMA PS1   Friedman-Pappas’s solo exhibition, Department, continues at the gallery through Saturday, May 16, 2026. 

Sophie Friedman-Pappas “Meet you in hell!”, 2026, film still DSLR wheel stop-motion animation, drawing horse Variable loop 24 x 29 x 13 inches @sloapy

Thank you to everyone that came to the opening last week!! Thank you Paul!!! “Department” is up and open @paulsoto_net through May 2nd Department 3, remade and reversed kiln, ceramic fiber blanket, sodium silicate “The coil’s design and production outlines but one of the alchemical processes initiated by industrialization. As metals merged in high temperature furnaces, companies and trusts consolidated into monopolies: the elemental and chemical transformations of the material seemed to take place at the level of business’ organization. And as matter, manufacture, and monopoly took shape, so too did the nature of the subject regulating these emergent forms: in parallel, the Industrialist set about fashioning their own singular-self. This would necessarily be a Mr. Subject-In-Control, an “I [that] insists it is not the Other, not the world… [which] is of course the home terrain of the Classical Modern Subject.” The Industrialist would offer their own subjectivity as a form of solidity in a changing, bending, twisting world – within the contours of the flexible, mutable alloy we could locate the unwavering rigidity of the Industrialist as character. But of course, this subjectivity was the result of storytelling magic, which is to say: a media-political mouthpiece bought to conceal the fact that the Industrialist produced little to no value. The value therein was the product of the collective labor of the workers. In this sense, the Industrialist’s narrative of individuation was an operation within capital’s perceptual physics: a distortion between the actual and apparent source of value in which the Industrialist posited themself as its source. This narrative offering generated a further transformation: the subjectivity of the Industrialist would be – in the eyes of the public – completely obliterated. Absorbed into the form of the firm, the Industrialist is a building, a bond, a brick. Let’s call this character FRICK.” Excerpt from Dominic Coles’s accompanying text

My solo show “Department” opens tonight, 6-8 at Paul Soto Gallery @paulsoto_net 121 W 27th in NY,NY — I would love to see you there! Kilns coils collectors — I am unbelievably grateful to Paul and to Dominic Coles for writing an accompanying text about a Mr. Subject-In-Control.

Finally sharing ‘The Conditions That Shape’ essay on SOPHIE FRIEDMAN-PAPPAS in @flashartmagazine 💌 Sophie’s solo show opens at Paul Soto @paulsoto_net this Friday, March 20 and will be included in upcoming MoMA PS1’s Greater New York 🌀 @momaps1 We talk about artists changing the way we think about things we see again and again, and if Sophie’s not one of them, I don’t know who is 🥹 Link in bio for “pigeon shit Airbnbs,” historical fiction forensics, and a practice attuned to the absurdity and grief of financialized waste and commodified ruin. From the text - ‘If we face the pent-up muck, which means facing ourselves, maybe some form of potential can be regurgitated from the toxicity we digest.’ Infinite thanks to @sloapy this is an emo one for me 🥹 👩‍🌾 🐄 💌 and of course @michelaisajedi !! — Images: all works Sophie Friedman-Pappas ‘Deltille-d Wall’s Necessary Anachronism 2,’ 2023. Courtesy of the artist and in lieu, Los Angeles (Photo: Nik Massey) ‘City Full of Sticks,’ 2020. Courtesy the artist and Alyssa Davis Gallery @alyssadavisgallery (Photo: Timothy Mahoney). ‘Hide Pile 3,’ 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Meredith Rosen Gallery @meredithrosengallery (Photo: Marissa Alter).

PAUL SOTO is proud to announce “Department,” a solo exhibition by the New York and Los Angeles based artist Sophie Friedman-Pappas. The exhibition will open at the gallery on Friday, March 20th, with a reception for the artist from 6 to 8pm. “Department” will coincide with Friedman-Pappas’s inclusion in Greater New York 2026, which opens at MoMA PS1 on April 16th. SOPHIE FRIEDMAN-PAPPAS (b. 1995, New York) divides her time between New York and Los Angeles. She received her MFA from UCLA in 2024, and her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. Friedman-Pappas has held solo and two-person exhibitions at MAK Center for Art & Architecture, Los Angeles; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York, NY; Hans Goodrich, Chicago; and Alyssa Davis Gallery (organized by Octagon), New York; and has participated in group exhibitions at Paul Soto, New York; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; and Soft Opening, London, among others.

@post_fair opens today — I’m showing some new drawings with @hansgoodrich — they’re stilled sets from an animation I made about a perspective G-Man procrasturbating to Robert Hanssen’s (FBI Turncoat) domestic erotica corkscrewed together with works on paper that trace waste valorization from Mario Buda’s 1920 Wall Street Bombing. Horsehair mattresses, helical coils, bird shit, cameras, various humiliated boi/fbi agents! All the love in the world to @peteranastos and @junyawannabe ! He’s Finished 3 Graphite, oil paint, tape, and kneaded eraser on paper

Hans Goodrich will be participating in Post-Fair 2026 with a presentation of Sophie Friedman-Pappas. Sophie Friedman-Pappas I’m Finished, 2025 Graphite, oil paint, and colored pencil on paper 
 10 1/4 x 14 inches (unframed)
 14 x 17 3/4 inches (framed) —— Post-Fair 2026 Thursday 2/26: 11am - 8pm Friday 2/27: 11am - 6pm Saturday 2/28: 11am - 6pm @hansgoodrich @sloapy @post_fair #hansgoodrich #sophiefriedmanpappas #postfair

Short-Lived Relief (2025) features a DSLR wheel stop-motion animation set in the former boardroom of the old Sinclair Oil Building—now a luxury apartment and photo shoot location in New York’s Financial District. The video follows an anonymous G-Man (government man) on probation as he fixates on documents from disgraced FBI agents of the past, including an erotic story written in 1998 by American turncoat Robert Hanssen depicting his wife Bonnie as she struggles with a window shade. The aroused agent masturbates out of a window onto an unsuspecting passerby. Imagining a bird, the soiled pedestrian thinks it’s good luck. ‘dropping, dropping’ open today and tomorrow!

I’m showing a new piece alongside Michael Assiff and Lothar Baumgarten at Rumplestiltskin (34 W 27th St, #302 New York, NY) opening Friday September 19th from 6-8 — I’ll see you there! It’s also me and Michael’s birthdays the week before and after respectively — so come and celebrate!! 🩷🩷 @michael_as_if_ @jobb2 + nick Thank you @unidoots for my refresher course your insight and your stuff!!! And thank you for introducing me to many different experimental animators whose work I now love! + @timothyrmahoney for his genius compositional set up I started doing stop-motion in high school and took one class on it in undergrad. Haven’t done it in a long time but making this I realized how much its structure informed how I make sculptures and drawings today. S/o to the girl in my college animation class that told me in crit my stop-motion was “the most disturbing thing” she’s “ever seen” — I’m back baby!