Sofia Areal began her artistic training at Herefordshire College of Art & Design in the UK, attending the Textile Design course between 1978 and 1979 and the Foundation Course between 1979 and 1980. Her initial interest in the tapestry technique was directed towards painting and drawing, due to the time associated with the production process, where she found speed, the instant, and in them she found the freedom of impulse, surprise and accident, and the exploration of a unison relationship with supports and materials. In Portugal, she attended the Ar.Co painting and engraving workshops between 1981 and 1983. She has exhibited collectively since 1982 and individually since 1990.

Her works are abstract compositions, overlapping and juxtaposing shapes and lines, between emptiness and fullness. In them lives the contrast between separation and coziness, between home and travel, between withering and blossoming, between the weak and the brave, between sea and land. Day and night, life and death, sky and abyss. In dimensions that vary between large and small format, rectangular, square or round, he applies, on canvas and on paper, indiscriminately disorganizing the codes of drawing and painting, graffiti, dry pastels, India ink, watercolor, acrylic paint, and elements resulting from cutting and collage. In her composition, she seeks a solar ideal, an aesthetic of beauty, of pleasure, of harmony, which she looks for in relationships of balance, between background and composition, between scratch and stain, between textures and smoothness, between opacities and transparencies, between the solid colors of a palette in which reds, yellows, blues, blacks and whites predominate without renouncing the presence of unfolding secondary colors, and finds in the formal contrasts that emerge from the instinct of the overtly muscular gesture, which inscribe the personal.

Her works are part of the collections (selection): Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa; Fundação de Serralves, Porto; Caixa Nova da Galiza, Vigo; FEVAL, Cáceres; Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Funchal (MUDAS), Funchal, Fundação Carmona e Costa, Lisboa; Casa da Cerca — Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Almada; Fundação Millennium BCP, Lisboa; Coleção Novo Banco, Lisboa; Fundação PLMJ, Lisboa; Fundação Oriente, Lisboa; Fundação Leal Rios, Lisboa; Coleção Cachola, Elvas; Coleção Fernando Ribeiro, Abrantes; Coleção Luís Ferreira, Lisboa; Coleção Alberto Caetano, Lisboa.