Sofia Basto Riousse is a Colombian-French artist based in Dubai since 2015.

A former lawyer who traded legal codes for visual poetry, her practice centers on the contemplative exercise of finding transcendence in the mundane. Through still lifes of market fruits, embroidered domestic objects, and watercolor studies of wilting flowers, she elevates everyday ephemera into meditations on time, place, and belonging.

Working across murals, calligraphy, and mixed-media painting, Basto Riousse employs organic materials—mineral pigments, threads, tropical botanicals—to bridge her Andean childhood with her current desert surroundings. A bowl of lulos becomes a relic; a embroidered coffee stain maps memory; a window ledge of potted herbs transforms into a sacred grove. These quiet tableaus, often infused with surreal juxtapositions, invite viewers to reconsider their own daily rituals as sites of quiet wonder.

Her work has been exhibited internationally while maintaining a dialogue with the landscapes that shaped her: the Colombian tropics where she first observed nature's slow alchemy, the Parisian streets where she studied light's daily performances, and now the Emirates, where shifting sands mirror her ongoing exploration of impermanence.

*"I paint like one tends to plants—with the understanding that the ordinary, when observed closely, reveals its extraordinary bones."*