featured artists
clouds, waterfalls, and wonder
Cascade into the surreal with artist, Sodam Kim.
In the mid 90s, a young Sodam Kim stepped into the hallowed halls of the Frankfurt University of Fine Arts in Germany. It was here, under the tutelage of Danish painter Per Kirkeby, that her path as an artist began to take shape. The freewheeling atmosphere of her art school, devoid of structured classes or assignments, gave her the freedom to explore within Frankfurt’s myriad galleries, museums, and cultural spaces. Among these, the Film Museum became her second classroom.
Sodam recalls spending countless hours immersed in the cinematic works of auteurs like Luis Buñuel and David Lynch. Their surreal and provocative visions stirred something special within her, leaving her both inspired and torn. Her trajectory took a monumental turn when she stumbled upon Per Kirkeby’s early works. The realization that the artist whose works had captivated her a year earlier in Norway was now her professor felt nothing short of miraculous, anchoring her commitment to painting going forward.
Sodam’s early works bore the unmistakable imprint of her fascination with film. Influenced by multimedia artists like Sigmar Pole, her debut series, Sequence, merged cinematic language with painterly experimentation, moving canvases in unexpected directions to uncover narratives born of chance.
After returning to Korea in 2003, Sodam’s focus shifted to themes of the surreal, mysterious, and unconscious. Following a creative slump, she reemerged in 2015 with renewed vigor, producing works that pursued a balance between the external and internal worlds. Among her favored motifs were clouds and waterfalls, elements of nature that imitated the changeability and fragility of human existence. For her, clouds are especially abstract, existing in various forms before disappearing like smoke in an instant. Similarly, her depictions of waterfalls have evolved over the years, transforming from symbols of emotional pain to therapeutic emblems of cleansing and rebirth. This embrace of unpredictability exemplifies her lifelong quest to push the boundaries of imagination, painting original landscapes that evoke the natural laws of creation and destruction, and brim with a cosmic sense of wonder.
