Miami artist brings his Everglades-inspired vision to MIA

Magnus Sodamin’s vibrantly colorful, Everglades-inspired murals have been turning heads across Miami-Dade County, from Miami’s FTX Arena to Edgewater’s 2500 Biscayne Boulevard building and the Miami Springs Community Center.

Now, visitors to Miami International Airport can get an eyeful of Sodamin’s environmentally conscious work with Reflections of Florida Wild, the artist’s latest mural located at MIA’s Concourse E on the first floor near Door 9 (pre-security). The long-time Miami resident sees his newest work as a reflection of South Florida’s wild neighbors, lush landscape, and the importance of preserving these wild spaces for the future of our water source and biodiversity.

“Every time I’m on a flight, I get a window seat peering out over places I’ve visited in the glades,” says Sodamin. “The first thing I would like travelers to see, whether entering the city or leaving, is a reflection of the environment that’s here, and to gain a perspective of what they are viewing from the plane. Through these works, I hope to evoke their memory and memorialize Florida’s magnificent and unique wilderness.”

Sodamin’s lush nature-inspired paintings explore changing global narratives through spiritual inquiry and spontaneous creativity. His process is cathartic and vigorous, resulting in paintings that reflect the beauty of the natural world while exploring the states of ecosystems and the environment. His vibrant works are full of energetic gestures that are both joyful and turbulent, indicative of the artist’s passionate sense of awe and quiet reverence of nature.

Using an expanded painting practice that is both hallucinatory and precise, Sodamin employs various techniques to blur the frontier between abstraction and landscape painting. His singular installations often begin with painting the walls and floors of an exhibition space with vibrant splashes of color and then installing the space with similarly emotive yet complementary canvas or panel compositions. The result is entirely immersive.

Sodamin received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting with a minor in art history from the New World School of the Arts in Miami. He spent a year developing his painting practice at the Nansenskolen (The Nansen Academy) in Lillehammer, Norway, a humanitarian institute that focuses on cross-cultural exchange. He lives and works in Miami, where his next scheduled solo show Wild Alter will be at Dot Fiftyone Gallery September 18 to November 13.