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Lot Essay
“Fourteen years ago, I discovered terracotta as a working material, the oldest and closest medium that has served to leave the imprints of our passage,” Marín wrote in 1998. “It is only earth and water, molded, to be later burned in fire. It is the perfect material to talk about myself, to talk about man, to talk about what I feel” (“Mujer Azul by Javier Marín,” Sculpture Review 47, no. 2, Fall 1998). Based in Mexico, Marín sold out his first solo in the United States at Iturralde Gallery in Los Angeles, where he showed a dozen sculptures—Torso de hombre amarillo among them—made out of kiln-fired Oaxacan clay. He went on to exhibit at the 49th and 50th Venice Biennales (2001 and 2003) and has held recent solo exhibitions at the Place du Louvre in Paris (2018) and the San Diego Museum of Art (2018). He is represented in major public collections, including the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, the Museo de Arte Latinoamerica de Buenos Aires, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
“Marín’s nudes ape the dense musculature, careful proportions and heroic scale characteristic of the Classical nude,” wrote critic Susan Kandel in her review of Marín’s debut at Iturralde. “Yet, instead of the chilly beauty of marble or the daunting richness of bronze, Marín substitutes a warm terra-cotta, at once sacrificing impassivity for intimacy. What’s more, Marín views the body not as a Platonic ideal, an embodiment of the soul, but as a surface that cries out for decoration. Thus, his figures are covered with rivulets of multicolored pigment—often pastel greens, pinks and yellows—and are etched with various lines, squiggles, arrows, and geometric marks. If Marín can be said to do violence to a certain tradition, his work everywhere corroborates it” (“Non-Traditional Tradition,” Los Angeles Times, 16 December 1993).
Worked at a monumental scale, Torso de hombre amarillo appears in a presumed contrapposto: the head cranes to the left, its position balanced by the opposing weight of the upper right arm, anchored to the hip. He gazes downward, eyes closed, in exquisitely expressive agony; glazes in pink, red, blue, and green cascade down his body, streaming over fissures of flesh and muscle. “My sculptures are images—materialized emotions that are not sustained in reality,” Marín has explained. “They do not pretend to imitate or copy an original. I never work with models. I have created my own anatomy. If a muscle is missing, I create it, and if I have one too many, I simply erase it.” The drama is both baroque, recalling seventeenth-century sculpture from Bernini to Catholic churches in the New World, and intimately personal. “For as long as I can remember, sculpture has existed within me,” Marín acknowledges. “It is my channel of expression, a liberation of emotions that materializes only because of it. Sculpture is an extension of me. It regenerates, ramifies, and expands me. It responds to a natural necessity. My sculpture is me, I am it” (“Mujer Azul by Javier Marín,” op. cit.).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“Marín’s nudes ape the dense musculature, careful proportions and heroic scale characteristic of the Classical nude,” wrote critic Susan Kandel in her review of Marín’s debut at Iturralde. “Yet, instead of the chilly beauty of marble or the daunting richness of bronze, Marín substitutes a warm terra-cotta, at once sacrificing impassivity for intimacy. What’s more, Marín views the body not as a Platonic ideal, an embodiment of the soul, but as a surface that cries out for decoration. Thus, his figures are covered with rivulets of multicolored pigment—often pastel greens, pinks and yellows—and are etched with various lines, squiggles, arrows, and geometric marks. If Marín can be said to do violence to a certain tradition, his work everywhere corroborates it” (“Non-Traditional Tradition,” Los Angeles Times, 16 December 1993).
Worked at a monumental scale, Torso de hombre amarillo appears in a presumed contrapposto: the head cranes to the left, its position balanced by the opposing weight of the upper right arm, anchored to the hip. He gazes downward, eyes closed, in exquisitely expressive agony; glazes in pink, red, blue, and green cascade down his body, streaming over fissures of flesh and muscle. “My sculptures are images—materialized emotions that are not sustained in reality,” Marín has explained. “They do not pretend to imitate or copy an original. I never work with models. I have created my own anatomy. If a muscle is missing, I create it, and if I have one too many, I simply erase it.” The drama is both baroque, recalling seventeenth-century sculpture from Bernini to Catholic churches in the New World, and intimately personal. “For as long as I can remember, sculpture has existed within me,” Marín acknowledges. “It is my channel of expression, a liberation of emotions that materializes only because of it. Sculpture is an extension of me. It regenerates, ramifies, and expands me. It responds to a natural necessity. My sculpture is me, I am it” (“Mujer Azul by Javier Marín,” op. cit.).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park