In the artist's words
Light, Geometry, and the Architecture of Transformation (Curatorial Statement by Daniela Holban, 2026)
For over six decades, Sandy Sokoloff has pursued a singular artistic question: how does one give form to the unseen? Born into Brooklyn’s vibrant Jewish community of the 1940s and later trained at Boston University, Sokoloff’s early formation unfolded between disciplined formalism and spiritual searching. His years teaching in New England and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony catalyzed an inquiry that would define his life’s work: the pursuit of divine presence through geometry, light, and chromatic depth.
Sokoloff’s paintings stand apart from both strict representation and postmodern spectacle. Borrowing from sacred architectural elements such as Romanesque vaulting systems, domes, and oculi, he constructed luminous atmospheric spheres framed by architectural scaffolds. If Rothko sought transcendence through color and Noland through structure, Sokoloff forged a third path rooted in sacred cosmology.
His monumental canvases, often spanning eight to ten feet, became sites of spiritual architecture. Drawing on Judaic mysticism and the Sephirot, mystical emanations of divine light, Sokoloff layered acrylic paint into radiant portals. These works were not representations of religious dogma but visual ontologies of being and not being, seeing and believing. His “Eye of God” series expanded this inquiry, positioning the oculus as a conduit through which divine illumination enters the human realm.
In 2024, shortly after turning eighty, Sokoloff was diagnosed with Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), a progressive neurological condition that necessitated the use of a wheelchair and fundamentally altered his physical relationship to painting. Rather than marking an end, this diagnosis initiated a profound transformation. Where once the body moved across vast canvases, now the canvas comes to the body. Where once monumental scale dominated, intimacy and concentration prevail. The physical architecture of his paintings, vaults, domes, structural scaffolds, has given way to a new architecture of process.
Sokoloff now begins digitally, manipulating photographic fragments of earlier works and compositional studies in Photoshop. These are printed to his specifications on stretched canvas. From his wheelchair, he re-enters the surface with paint, modifying, disrupting, and completing the image by hand. What might be mistaken for technological mediation is in fact a recalibration of authorship, an adaptive strategy that preserves the primacy of intuition and light.
The paradox that has always animated his work, how to embody the immaterial, now extends to the artist himself. Disability has not diminished the inquiry; it has intensified it. The unseen divine once translated into geometry now parallels the unseen neurological shifts within his own body. Light, once metaphor, becomes lived necessity. Scale has reduced, but compression has amplified resonance. The oculus, once architectural reference, now feels autobiographical, an aperture through which endurance, vulnerability, and resilience enter the work.
Sokoloff’s practice demonstrates that disability does not sever an artistic trajectory; it reconfigures it. Constraint becomes catalyst. Limitation becomes lens. The architectural vaults of earlier decades find their echo in a restructured studio process that remains equally rigorous and equally luminous. If earlier works constructed sacred space, the current works inhabit it. In this sense, Sokoloff’s evolution mirrors the central question of his paintings: how does light enter form? How does the invisible become visible? Through adaptation, persistence, and an unwavering devotion to sacred geometry, Sandy Sokoloff continues to render the paradox of divine presence, now embodied not only in painted architecture but in the architecture of his own transformed practice.
