Casa Wabi, a nonprofit arts center located in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico, is a stage for world-renowned contemporary artists and architects to engage with the local community. Tadao Ando's remarkable Casa Wabi dots the Pacific coastline of Mexico with structures by Alberto Kalach, Alvaro Siza, Kengo Kuma, Gloria Cabral, Solano Benitez, Jorge Ambrosi, and Gabriela Etchegaray. Founded in 2013 by renowned Mexican artist Bosco Sodi, it combines artist residencies, a gallery, and living quarters with classrooms, gardens, and public space. Tadao Ando centers the foundation on a 312-meter-long wall; his trademark concrete structures radiate off it, capped in woven palm tree leaves for ventilation. These local palapa-style roofs are often the only element distinguishing indoor and outdoor spaces, an effect complemented by wooden shutters in place of paned glass windows. Other unusual native building materials include Mexican parota wood and marmolina. Led by director Carla Sodi, Casa Wabi challenges architects and artists to contemplate nature deeply, as it provides new tools for area residents. Casa Wabi is both a world-class architectural destination and a model for new strategies of creative intervention within economically depressed communities.

It starts with a simple idea: massive cubes of clay, half a meter high. The sculptures of Mexican artist Bosco Sodi (*1970 in Mexico City), cubes of fired clay stacked in high columns, ought to have exploded while being fired due to the extreme heat released in the material: sand, earth, and water. The richly illustrated publication on Sodi's Clay Cubes explores the course of his experiment. He worked for several months creating the cubes, from compounding the material through layering and forming to drying and firing them in a kiln built especially for this purpose. Piled up to columns in the exhibition, they resemble the proportions of the human body and at the same time create an architecture reduced to the essential. Each cube bears the traces of the work process, following Sodi's typical approach: the process of trying out and arriving as a result whose appearance he may influence, but not foresee.

'It's about embracing the accident, embracing the non-control, embracing the passing of time and working with organic materials.' Bosco SodiThis signed, limited edition publication accompanies artist Bosco Sodi's 2019 exhibition at Blain Southern (London, 30 January - 23 March 2019). In this new series of relief paintings, Sodi introduces, for the first time, a stark contrast between darkness and light, creating a dialogue between opposing forces. Sodi combines black and white pigments with glue and organic material, such as sawdust or natural fibres, introducing an element of impurity. His relationship with these crude materials draws from wabi-sabi, a Japanese aesthetic philosophy that embraces imperfection and reveres natural authenticity above all.The paintings are the outcome of an intensively physical process in which experimentation and chance play an important role. Laying the canvas horizontally, Sodi sculpturally layers his paint mixture by hand over several days, stopping at the first signs of cracking. He then gives the process over to time and the elements, as the work dries and fissures form across its surface.Designed by A Practice for Everyday Life, with 12 silkscreen cover variations printed on textured paper, this volume contains reproductions of the works in the exhibition alongside reference images and a text by Dr Aaron Rosen, Professor of Religious Studies & Director of International and Cultural Projects at Rocky Mountain College, Billings, Montana.

"Bosco Sodi creates relief-like three-dimensional surfaces of profound organic beauty. His works are based on a variety of materials and strongly colored paints which he distributes across the canvas. The selection of brilliant colors and the colored pigments, for which he searches throughout the world, allow viewers to experience the artist's work with more than just their sense of sight. They transpose him to another place. Sodi 'composes' his pictures using vertical layers on the canvas and uses a mixture of pure pigment, sawdust, cellulose, natural fibers, water, and glue. He makes use of a very elaborate process to create a surface structure that is remarkably lively. He determines the outer frame, decides on the color of the pigments, and lays down the format of the picture carrier and the amount of material which he then forms on the canvas directly with his hands. But everything that happens after that is an independent process which the artist cannot influence. Although he always works with the same materials, what results are strongly colored monochrome virgin landscapes permeated by a profound beauty. The accompanying video shows Sodi 'constructing' the work ORGANIC BLUE - created in Berlin. Bosco Sodi (b. 1970 in Mexico City) lives and works in Mexico City, Barcelona, Berlin, and New York. With essays by: Agustin Arteaga, Marc Gisbourne, Bernado Pinto de Almeida, Lilly Wei, an interview with Robert Peterson "

NEW YORK, November 7, 2011-The Pace Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition of new work by Mexican-born artist Bosco Sodi, featuring twelve large-scale, monochromatic paintings created in 2011 in Sodi's studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Bosco Sodi: Ubi sunt will be on view at 545 West 22nd Streetfrom December 9, 2011 through February 4, 2012. A catalogue with an essay by art historian, critic, andcurator Mark Gisbourne will accompany the exhibition. The title of Sodi's exhibition, Ubi sunt, is a medieval Latin phrase meaning Where are...?, which can be understood as a meditation on mortality and life's transience. In his catalogue essay, Matters of Memory and Material Intuition, Mark Gisbourne writes that Ubi sunt is an engagement with a lamentation of what is past brought into the present. Each of Sodi's paintings is a summary of his memories and collective experiences, made present by an arduous and direct method of creating that demands his full physical and emotional participation. Ubi sunt is also a concept that reflects the phenomenological experience of Sodi's art. Gisbourne states that Sodi's personal aesthetic view is realised through an arduous physical processing and manipulation of materials. But at the same time further characterised by their being inseparably embedded within the creative phenomenological intuitions that the materials are able to both generate and revivify. It is a personal equation where past and present experiences and associations are brought each time into a unique state of provisionalinternal unity.

Casa Wabi, a nonprofit arts center located in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico, is a stage for world-renowned contemporary artists and architects to engage with the local community. Tadao Ando's remarkable Casa Wabi dots the Pacific coastline of Mexico with structures by Alberto Kalach, Alvaro Siza, Kengo Kuma, Gloria Cabral, Solano Benitez, Jorge Ambrosi, and Gabriela Etchegaray. Founded in 2013 by renowned Mexican artist Bosco Sodi, it combines artist residencies, a gallery, and living quarters with classrooms, gardens, and public space. Tadao Ando centers the foundation on a 312-meter-long wall; his trademark concrete structures radiate off it, capped in woven palm tree leaves for ventilation. These local palapa-style roofs are often the only element distinguishing indoor and outdoor spaces, an effect complemented by wooden shutters in place of paned glass windows. Other unusual native building materials include Mexican parota wood and marmolina. Led by director Carla Sodi, Casa Wabi challenges architects and artists to contemplate nature deeply, as it provides new tools for area residents. Casa Wabi is both a world-class architectural destination and a model for new strategies of creative intervention within economically depressed communities.

studioMDA is a multidisciplinary architecture and design fi rm, based in New York and Frankfurt, founded by Markus Dochantschi, who previously worked for Zaha Hadid Architects. He has dedicated his design approach to examine how we see and display art throughout the world. As an authority on cultural buildings, the studio has worked extensively with renowned art collectors, artists and gallerists to design art galleries, art booths, and exhibitions. The publication highlights the relationship between art and architecture focusing on the diff erent scales of art and display. Conversations between artists, architects, gallerists, art dealers and art fair directors explore the correlation of space and scale. Diff erent relationships are found in the parallel practices of art and architecture embodied in diff erent formats of display from concept to construction.