“Two Herons,” 2021 and “Blue Heron”, 2021
“A Land Remembered”, 2023
Magnus Sodamin has created complex paintings and sculptures that reflect his love of the natural environment of Florida. The paintings in the exhibition are full of life and the sight of ceramic birds found among the bright colored yarn adds an extra dimension to the dynamic sculptures.
The museum’s information about the artist and his work-
Magnus Sodamin has garnered significant attention in Miami and beyond for over a decade with his bold, large-scale paintings, installations, and public commissions. Along with being an important figure in the city’s art world, he is also deeply involved in the region’s environmental issues. When not in his studio, he is often in the Everglades, on Florida Bay, or at reefs along the Keys, fishing, camping, and otherwise immersed in the fragile beauty of these unique ecosystems. In recent years, these experiences have inspired paintings that reflect his commitment to and concern for South Florida’s extraordinary natural environment.
While Sodamin works from onsite sketches, photographs, and memory, his landscape paintings are interpreted with a painterly artistic vision that verges on abstraction. Using gestural brushwork, he creates dense tactile surfaces of brilliant color, and his paintings express an energized spiritual connection to place. Wildlife Corridor resembles an exploding kaleidoscope of colorful fragments. The vibrant layers of paint and brushwork at times highlight or obscure representational elements in the painting. Bird wings and foliage ascend from the ground, drawing the eye upward. The top of the painting is arched, perhaps referencing an architectural passageway into the painting’s space.
In contrast to Wildlife Corridor’s abstraction, Sodamin’s latest work, A Land Remembered, is a clearly representational landscape. Rendered with urgent brushwork, raw colors, and a tangle of black linear drawing, A Land Remembered retains the expressionistic energy seen in the earlier Wildlife Corridor. It places the viewer amid a dense mangrove forest, peering through the foliage to open water and a fiery Florida sunset. Careful observation reveals abundant wildlife and other telling details.
Using a color palette like his paintings, Sodamin tufts thick strands of yarn, creating painterly, impasto-like textured surfaces. Accompanying the works on canvas are three large tapestry sculptures constructed of wool, steel rebar, and ceramics. These sculptures are embodiments of the iconic Everglades herons that populate many of Sodamin’s paintings. The forms and materials used are very abstract conceptions of these birds, but the ceramic heads that emerge at places from the wool make their reference clear. The tapestries are a surprising and inventive extension of his practice. Like the paintings, they evoke a primordial Florida where the natural world is charged with the energy of life and undisturbed by human interventions.