Why Sofía Muljat is in the Design 100

Sofía Muljat, born in Buenos Aires in 1999, works primarily in oil, building paintings that sit between figuration and abstraction. Her practice draws on a sustained dialogue with the Renaissance and Baroque, referencing painters such as Rubens, Caravaggio, Parmigianino and Murillo. Rather than reproducing their compositions, she translates the gestures around a pose, the pause between poses, a shift of light, into fields of colour and movement, giving her abstraction an unusually historical spine for a painter this early in her career.

Trained originally in psychology, Muljat treats painting as a way of working through memory and feeling, and it shows in how a canvas is built: as a record of what happens around an image rather than the image itself. Her work has shown in Buenos Aires, at Tube Cultural Hall in Milan, and, in July 2026, at Fundación Casa Santa Ana in Panama City, her first exhibition there. She is a painter worth watching as that work travels further beyond Argentina.