7 Artists to Follow If You Like Sofia Coppola

Girlish longing and luxurious surfaces are integral to Sofia Coppola’s films. Their plots are secondary to their atmospheres, which are often decadent and swathed in nostalgia. Marie Antoinette (2006) is best remembered for its ornate, confectionary costuming and scenes of Kirsten Dunst, as the titular queen, bathing and eating cakes. Even The Virigin Suicides (1999), a story of suburban malaise in Michigan, presents its heroines, the five adolescent Lisbon sisters, with an otherworldly, golden glow.

Coppola’s characters don’t usually fare well. Schoolboys worship the Lisbons, to tragic effect. Everyone knows what happened to Marie Antoinette. Priscilla Presley makes off slightly better in Priscilla (2023), another story in which big hair and marital entrapment figure prominently. Throughout all these portraits of disaffected girls, Coppola reexamines traditional markers of femininity. Sometimes they’re frivolous. Sometimes they’re as serious as life and death.

Here are seven artists who embrace similar subjects and sensibilities. As the boys say in The Virgin Suicides: “We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.” That’s great training, it turns out, for becoming a visual artist.

B. 1883, Paris. D. 1956, Paris.

Known for: Sensual, sapphic portraits in pretty pastels

Marie Laurencin’s early 20th century portraits embrace feminine flourishes and feature women almost exclusively. Though the painter began her career in Picasso’s Cubist circle in Paris, she soon developed a style all her own. Softened faces, lithe bodies, and lush backdrops fill her compositions, which she painted in the pretty pastels that also color the world of Coppola’s Antoinette. Fancy hats, ribbons, and bows adorn her figures, who embrace or otherwise show affection to the women and pets around them. Laurencin was clearly infatuated with the world of women.

Recent exhibitions have appraised Laurencin as a queer artist, though this aspect of her work was hardly legible in her day. Painting pretty women, after all, was what many of her male peers were also doing. Laurencin, too, offered a feminine idyll that appealed to many collectors, and her attractive work sold easily.

Only lately have curators and scholars begun to see how unusual Laurencin’s approach was. She painted the women she admired, with few qualms about her work’s suggestion of sexuality. With these portraits, and her art teaching, she earned a living and supported herself. She didn’t need a man, on canvas or in life.

B. 1972, Alexandria, Scotland. Lives and works in Glasgow.

Known for: Dreamy, diaphanous installations

Karla Black has used bath bombs, lipstick, glitter, and eye shadow to create her fantastical installations. Her palettes favor pastels, especially pinks. The artist is less interested in her materials’ cultural connotations than in their aesthetic properties. She creates powdery platforms and floors, and the gauzy, diaphanous forms that she hangs from ceilings can evoke gowns and sartorial detailing. These elements together suggest a sense of theater. And what is femininity but a performance?

Black has expressed frustration about comparisons to her great sculptural forebear Louise Bourgeois (Eva Hesse makes for another easy association). Yet the historical figure Black does cite as inspiration is telling: She is informed by the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who theorized infants’ complicated relationships to the nourishment provided by their mothers. In this case, Black harbors an uneasy attitude towards her artistic foremothers.

Coppola has tied her themes of female stuckness and isolation back to her own mother, an assistant art director who wound up subservient to her filmmaker husband, Francis Ford Coppola. In an interview with The New Yorker, the younger Coppola recently said: “I’m sure seeing my first impression of womanhood as a woman who felt trapped, and her sadness, is related to the women in my films.”

B. 1984, Columbia, South Carolina. Lives and works in New York.

Known for: Painting the binds of femininity

Beauty and pain are inextricably linked in Sarah Slappey’s paintings. She depicts sleek body parts being stabbed by pins and jewelry, or tied up in chains, bows, or strands of pearls. These images evoke the binds of femininity—something that Coppola’s subjects are all too familiar with.

Some of Slappey’s paintings feature grids, either rigidly straight or curved along with the figures. These guidelines are another kind of constriction—suggesting that painting itself, limited to two dimensions, is a bind. Slappey’s disembodied limbs and breasts bend and contort as if in protest. As bound as they may be, they still appear to be attempting to break free, to touch, to retain a strangeness they can call their own.

B. 1985, Michigan City, Indiana. Lives and works in New York.

Known for: Colorful, Cubist-inspired portraits of women in repose

In the years leading up to the pandemic, Danielle Orchard made bright, geometric paintings of women lounging, communing, drinking, smoking, and enjoying both their solitude and their friendships. A can of Modelo, a hair-flecked razor, a tin of fish, or a potted cactus in a windowsill offered hints of a particular contemporary milieu, while Orchard’s fractured planes harkened back to her Cubist predecessors. Like Coppola, who has set her films in mid-century America and 18th-century Versailles, Orchard, too, unites historical styles with contemporary concerns to connect women’s lives and shifting aesthetic paradigms.

Recently, Orchard’s female figures have grown more shaded and dimensional, and many of them have pregnant bellies or a child in tow. The trajectory of Orchard’s paintings offers a story of girls growing up. Empty wine glasses and midnight snacks still occasionally appear, but the artist’s concerns have evolved, and her work’s formal qualities have matured along with her subject matter.

B. 1990, South Korea. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Known for: Wistful atmospheres in pastel, soft-focus paintings

Yoora Lee paints scenes of love and longing in soft focus. Her paintings suggest moments and feelings already fading in time. Staring out windows—evoking one of Coppola’s signature shots—and into their phones, Lee’s subjects can’t quite connect with the world around them. The artist takes inspiration from histories of French painting and Korean television dramas, and her works also memorialize art movements and eras past.

Lee’s still lifes further develop this wistful atmosphere. Papers flutter in a box beside a window, and flower bouquets brighten their domestic settings. These lush interiors find parallels in Coppola’s films, where boudoirs and hotel rooms are common environments—evocative interior landscapes that reflect the interiority of their subjects.

B. 1964, Beirut. Lives and works in Massachusetts.

Known for: Capturing the trappings of girlhood across cultures

Lebanese photographer Rania Matar documents the lives of girls and women amid states of quietude and upheaval. Her series “A Girl and Her Room,” which culminated in a 2012 book, features girls in their bedrooms, both in the U.S. and the Middle East. Traditional markers of feminine adolescence appear: celebrity posters, closets in varying stages of disarray, and healthy amounts of pink. Yet stuffed animals and personal photographs are also markers of intimacy and individuality. “The room was a metaphor, an extension of the girl, but also the girl seemed to be part of the room, to fit in, just like everything else in the material and emotional space,” Matar wrote in an artist statement. Like Coppola, the photographer finds meaning in interiors, in the objects and adornments with which young women define themselves.

Matar has also worked on series about girls at particular moments in their development. “L’Enfant-Femme” captured figures just before puberty, while “Becoming” returned to these same girls a few years later. As her subjects aged, their relationships to the camera developed, too.

B. 1962, Austin. Lives and works in Austin.

Known for: Mixed-media collages of Black girlhood