EDEN

Bringing together three artists with immersive bodies of work, we wanted this group show to reflect various interpretations of “paradise.” We have the narratives of Enid Blechman’s Red Divers of the Everglades, Magnus Sodamin’s dense and profound paintings sanctifying the natural world, and Seung Lee’s ethereal mise-en-scènes created with experimental drawing techniques. Nature as something to protect, as sanctuary, and as inspiration. 

ENID BLECHMAN

Florida-based artist Enid Ehrich Blechman was born in New York City and her interests are ecological and environmental. Red Divers of the Everglades is a series of works blending science and imagination. She assumes the guise of a CEO for Adipose Industries, a fictional corporation that responds to ecological emergencies. Along with a team of red-suited divers, their exploits lead to battle with a very real threat in Florida: cyanobacteria. We also have on view several of Blechman’s pieces involving the use of microscope slides and their correlation to genetic studies.

Blechman has a BFA in Drawing, Painting & Graphics from Ohio State University, an MA in Studio Art with honors from SUNY Albany, and was an honors scholarship recipient at Savannah College of Art and Design, where she received her MFA in painting, summa cum laude. One year after receiving her degree from SCAD, she had a solo show at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

She has received the New York Foundation for the Arts Award, been featured in New American Paintings and was chosen as one of the top ten visual artists in Palm Beach County by the Broward Times. Her solo show at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum highlighted her current ecological interests. After a residency in Beijing in 2017, she began work on a monumental piece for a new hospital in Jacksonville, Florida. The piece consists of 10,000 hand-painted microscope slides and hangs in the lobby of the Baptist/MD Anderson Cancer Center.

MAGNUS SODAMIN

Miami-based artist Magnus Sodamin creates work that speaks on the sanctity of natural spaces. His marks are wild and gestural, each their own discovery, and each work an expedition. His images are vibrantly colorful, and at a distance, uncanny. As one gets closer, they become more abstracted and enveloping. They invite you to explore them. 

Sodamin was born in Manhattan and grew up in Norway with frequent outings in nature with his grandparents. These experiences inform his intentions with nature, as well as his practice. Often traveling to locations near and far, Magnus’s current venture is to Peru in the company of scientists studying life in the Amazon. 

Sodamin attended the New World School of the Arts as well as the Nansen Academy in Lillehammer, Norway. Sodamin has exhibited in Norway and the United States, showing work at Cisneros-Fontanals art foundation (CIFO), the Lotus House Women’s Shelter Fundraiser at the Margulies Collection, two consecutive solo exhibits at Primary Gallery, and most recently at Dotfiftyone gallery in Miami. He has been in residence at the Deering Estate, the MuseumsQuartier Residency, Vienna, and Summit AIR, Eden, UTAH.

SEUNG LEE

Seung Lee is a New York-based Korean-American contemporary artist. Often gaining inspiration from natural objects as well as discarded ones, he seeks to re-evaluate these subjects in terms of the present. These items hold their history as they are reinterpreted. The layers of his works are each cocooned within the following one.

Lee is currently Director of Fine Arts and Graduate Studies at Long Island University, Post Campus and has taught for 32 years. He received a BFA in Drawing from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Painting from the Pratt Institute. His works have been exhibited extensively in the US, as well as internationally in China, Italy, France, Japan, and Korea. His work has received numerous reviews in the New York Times, Newsday, Kyoto Times, Korea Daily News, Art Word Magazine, Art in Culture Magazine, Art Price Magazine, and Art and People Magazine.

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