Anna Erickson Presents Sofía Muljat at Untitled Miami 2025
Sofía Muljat
Sofia Muljat conjures the Baroque in her surreal paintings, interlacing luminous, sweeping gestures that overlap and dissolve across each abstract composition. Inspired by the historical work of Rubens, Caravaggio, Parmigianino, and Murillo, Muljat begins each painting with a reference image anchored in classical systems of image-making, which the artist then obscures through a veil of lyrical brushstrokes. Layers of ambiguity coalesce in suggestive forms that feel vaguely familiar, embedded with nostalgia for an epoch that no longer exists.
Muljat’s paintings resonate with emotion; figures, structures, and spaces are dematerialized and rendered by the artist in their purest forms. Opulent scenes of archaic nobility and the sublime are deconstructed and transformed into layers of vivid color and depth — a reflection of the artist’s rich interior world. Muljat’s process is labor-intensive and driven by what the artist terms “an impulsive energy.” In seeking to dispel her own anxiety, a seemingly inescapable symptom of contemporary life, Muljat’s work excavates her own psychology to access the vast visual topography of our collective subconscious. In this way, her work is indebted to Surrealism, but without the unbridled spontaneity associated with the genre; rather, Muljat intentionally roots each composition in the organizational framework of her reference materials, allowing an underlying logic to ground her ethereal brushwork and contributing to the sense of balance and serenity that radiates from her paintings.
By amplifying specific details from her source imagery, Muljat performs a kind of sublimation, transferring the drama of historical paintings into abstract gestures and fluid, demonstrative movements that unfold across the canvas. In seeking to bridge the organic and the structured as a unified surface, Muljat achieves a tenuous aesthetic harmony, a delicate balancing act born of oppositional forces, applying and releasing visual pressure. Muljat’s paintings are thus attuned to emotional wellsprings that may be defined as intuition. However, by intentionally mapping her gestures to an antecedent framework of order and logic, Muljat’s work transcends the personal, becoming an extension of our universal psyche, in all its brilliant fragility, longing, and resilience.
Sofia Muljat (born 1999) lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She received her degree in Psychology from the University of Buenos Aires. She has been included in shows at Tube Cultural Hall in Milan, Gachi Prieto in Buenos Aires, and will have a forthcoming solo exhibition in 2026 at Casa Santa Ana in Panama City, Panama.