Sophie Z. S. Suaning (b. 1992) is a painter, composer and musician. She holds an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. Suaning's practice treats painting as a panpsychist, hypersensory, almost alchemical space. Her works are stylistically loose, effortless and insistently vital. Her paintings become subjects that themselves experience, in addition to being maps of the movements of the brush.
Suaning's paintings are built up through many semi-transparent layers - commonly the historical rabbit-skin glue mixed with pigments, graphite, ink and strange self-invented media, sometimes supplemented with materials such as snow, make-up, dried flowers, butterfly wings, blood, tattoo ink, chemical powder and metals, often finished with traditional oil paint and resin varnish. The surfaces appear equally porous and saturated, equally dense and pop-inflected, with a drawing-like lightness in which the motif seems to vibrate between dissolution and emergence. A recurring thread in her painting is an interest in painting as an etymological, mythological, sensuous preservation of memory.
Solo exhibitions include Skjulested, Hallen, Copenhagen (2025) and Mystic Fuel, Svendborg (2024). Her works have been shown in group exhibitions at, among other venues, Museum Sønderjylland (2023); Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, Copenhagen (2022); Kunsthall Oslo, Oslo (2022); MUNCH Museum, Oslo (2022); The Round Tower, Copenhagen (2019); Arcway, Copenhagen (2019); Galleri Tom Christoffersen, Copenhagen (2019); Coyote, Stockholm (2019); Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2018); ALT_CPH, Copenhagen (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde (2018); and SMK Fridays, Copenhagen (2017).
Parallel to her painting, Suaning works as a musician and composer, and her musical works have been performed at, among other venues, Ribe Cathedral, The Round Tower, the MUNCH Museum and Kunsthall Oslo. In 2024 she was a lecturer during the summer semester at the Jutland Art Academy and regularly teaches painting as well as painterly and musical compositional strategies. She has been involved in running the music venue Mayhem in Copenhagen since 2019.