Bo Magnus ran a film production company with her husband for 10 years
making shorts and children’s films.  She has also taught fine art to
teenagers. In the end the art bore out and eventually she took herself
to college.

We talk about childhood and the scope for play and interpretation. I
mention a current show by Martin Honert, where he has reproduced from
memory his boarding school bedroom, a sculptural installation that
functions like a three-dimensional photographic negative. Bo talks
about an enduring influence, the director Werner Herzog, his intense
early films such as Aguirre, My best fiend and Even dwarfs started
small, about new land, battle, aggression.

In one corner of the room a spotlight illuminates a small congregation
of plastic figurines. Today’s arrangement is a homage to Shirin
Neshat’s film, The Green Garden, where four women from different
classes talk about their lives and politics. In Bo’s feudal
arrangement princesses, maidens and fairies seem about to charge
forth, sword in hand. The background is a picture of an apple grove,
next to which a male figurine falls back. This is one of many
stagings, Bo has orchestrated as starting points for the often
anarchic crusades that are her paintings. She follows a very
particular method, painting onto perspex plates, so that the works are
visible from both sides. Her studio is full of acrylic medium - the
base for her pigments. Using a tool she draws whilst the acrylic is
still fluid, leaving an often gestural, loose and semi-transparent
image.
(Soraya Rodriguez, Zoo Art Enterprises, FT10 Summer Catalogue)



I was transfixed by the pellucid, marbled effects created by Bo Magnus
using acrylic in medium on Perspex; her small, theatrical figures had
an ephemeral, dreamlike quality, as if they were made of smoke or
reflected on the surface of rippling water.
(Kitty Hudson, MurmurART, Review Jul 13, 2010)



Bo Magnus's acrylic paint on film firmly manages to make abstract
classical styled work, work. Due to what looks like the effect it
creates a certain ill-defined fantasy dream, depicting various
dignitaries, lords and peasants alike, flowing gracefully in
celebration or pose. Although some people feel like they're missing
something, I couldn't help take pleasure in watching some spectators
squirm their pupils desiring details that weren't there. One man also
tried to peer behind the paintings as though the artist may have
pinned them on the wrong way around.
(Roger Daniel, MurmurART, Review Jul 13, 2010)