Bosco Sodi Exhibition: A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains

Description

Axel Vervoordt Gallery presents a solo show with new works created here in Hong Kong by Mexican contemporary artist Bosco Sodi. In December 2019, Sodi spent two weeks in Hong Kong to create new works specifically exploring the depths and boundaries of the colour turquoise.

During Sodi’s Hong Kong stay, the city’s geography, landscape, energy, and rhythm had an influence on his practice and creation process. The artist states that local life added a unique depth and dimension to his work.

Through research, Sodi was particularly touched by the sweeping blue tones in Song dynasty painter Wang Ximeng’s thousand-year-old painting A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, which the artist borrows as this exhibition’s title in the spirit of its inspiration and impact on his work.

In addition to the new series of paintings, the gallery is presenting a selection of Sodi’s clay sculptures, created at the artist’s studio in Oaxaca, Mexico. There, he extracts raw earth from the ground and combines wit with water and sand to form clay. He uses the material, embedded with ancestral significance, to create minimalist sculptures.

Once cured, the clay sculptures are fired in a traditional brick kiln with wood, jacaranda seeds, and coconut shells, a process that imbues the sculptures with varied terracotta hues, streaks of green and black, and a multitude of fissures in the surface, giving each cube a unique identity.

Bosco Sodi is known for his bold, richly textured works that burst with colour and materiality. The artist’s paintings, or sculptural objects as he himself calls them, appear to be carved from the earth itself. Sodi’s work is informed by the wabi-sabi worldview of aesthetics where beauty is expressed in imperfection, transience and simplicity.