Ancizar Marin

Ancizar Marin is a Colombian sculptor who lives and works in South Florida. Born in Colombia, he received his first formal art training in the 1980s at the Bellas Artes Institute in Manizales and went on to study sculpture at the Luccio Petraglia School of Art in Bogotá, where he developed his command of bronze and steel. Travel through South America later exposed him to a melting pot of cultural influences that shaped his approach to color and texture.

Marin is best known for his climber sculptures and installations: small figures composed of fiberglass and resin and finished to a high gloss with car paint in a dazzling range of hues, which scale walls, rappel down windows, lean against columns and perch on lintels. Suspended on screws or wires that are looped, lassoed and threaded about them, they evoke teams of rock climbers, window washers, circus performers and divers, and his repertoire extends to balletic humanoid forms, vibrantly dressed joggers, elephants, birds and schools of fish. He also works in ceramic, metal and glass and in bronze. Marin often exhibits his sculptures in groups, giving the effect of performance troupes or herds of wild animals, and sometimes places them in public settings. Because the figures are relatively accessible in price, collectors are encouraged to acquire several at once and to arrange and rearrange them at will, so that the shadows thrown by the glossy little men and women who squat, leap, lunge, stretch and perform arabesques energize the walls on which they are installed, and the spatial sum of the parts exceeds the individual components.

His work follows the path of American Pop artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist in moving away from traditional subjects toward mass-produced images from contemporary life, and it emphasizes joy through movement, color and form. Marin hopes audiences will experience nothing more complicated than pleasure, a philosophy that pays homage to the Matissean credo that art should be joyful, free of troubling or depressing subject matter and accessible to everyone. In South Florida his work has been featured in design magazines, gallery shows and art fairs, and private commissions continue to proliferate.

Writing on his work, Denise M. Gerson, former associate director and curator of the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, observed that the active forms charm young and old and remind one that art is not always intended to intellectually challenge viewers. The critic Joan Lluís Montané of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) has described Marin's sculpture as weightless and dynamic, filled with color and driven by an underlying idea of freedom, noting that he is a born experimenter who works in bronze, resins, fiberglass and other materials. He has exhibited in cities across the world and his work is held in public and private collections.