Bosco Sodi: Beyond Wilderness

The He Art Museum (HEM) will present Bosco Sodi's largest solo exhibition in Asia. Co-curated by the artist and HEM, the exhibition will span three floors of the museum, presenting over 100 works from the artist's career including paintings, sculptures and site-specific installations. 

Bosco Sodi (b. 1970, Mexico City) reveals the emotive power embodied in the essential simplicity of raw material. The artist is known for his richly textured, vividly colored large-scale sawdust paintings and sculptures made from clay and volcanic rocks. Greatly influenced by the aesthetic philosophy of Wabi Sabi, Sodi focuses on material exploration, the creative gesture, and the spiritual connection between the artist and his work. His stylistic influences range from Art Informel, looking to artists such as Antoni Tàpies and Jean Dubuffet, to master colorists such as Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, and the bright hues of Mexico. 

Rendered in powerful, saturated hues, Sodi’s paintings blend raw pigment with sawdust, wood, pulp, natural fibers, and glue to create their dense surfaces. As the layers of material dry, structures form without the guidance or intervention of the artist. These fissured “landscapes” are both products of the artist’s careful balance of control and chaos, collaborating with the unpredictable forces of our natural world. 

Using bare hands and centuries-old techniques, Sodi’s gestures transform the banality of material into the transcendental. His gold and ceramic glazed rock sculptures emanate a powerful physicality and symbolically signify holiness and revelation in the timeless lineage of the ancient Mayan and Aztec stelae. As they are fired, the volcanic rocks metamorphose into sculptural objects that unite geological processes with traditional and contemporary art-making techniques. Sodi’s works are memorials and relics, incarnating his exploration and conversation with materials that come directly from the earth.