I am a Mexican sculptor who loves working with duality – Germán Arzate Garza

I am a Mexican sculptor who offers a dual vision in works where I combine scenes loaded with eroticism and humanity with elements of the natural/animal world that place me as a Mexican artist of fantastic realism.

The duality of human existence is a constant in my bronze sculptures: pleasure-pain, happiness-sadness, man-woman, solitude-company, love and breakup, themes that accompany my career as a Mexican sculptor.

In my work, I want to work with a marked creative and imaginative freedom but with a little more clarity compared to the artistic ruptures of the mid-20th century.

My proposal is located in the fusion of opposites, in their contradictory union which, however, thanks to the aesthetics that allow me to express myself as a Mexican sculptor dedicated to the concept placed in each work where I manage to unite these opposites in a concise expression using bronze as an expressive material.

However, in my artistic exploration as a Mexican sculptor, I have explored the expressive possibilities of other materials such as clay, plasticine, wood, marble, metals, and acrylic.

A Mexican sculptor of the new generation?

Although I consider myself a Mexican sculptor of the new generation, I always retake the human element and the body in classical expressions of sculpture thanks to its attention to detail in the representation of a face, muscles, or a body in motion.

For me, the most important thing and what I try to fully reflect in my bronze sculptures is the possibility of observing, dreaming, working exhaustively according to my own ideas as a Mexican sculptor, which I try to make public in the interviews that have been conducted with me regarding the motives of my work.

Being an artist in Mexico offers me the possibility of great imaginaries where fantastic realism and the multiplicity of themes offered by the diversity of influences and cultures are a constant, and as a Mexican sculptor, I take advantage of the classic and original influences that in this legendary land have contributed Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, and other names known to world criticism.

My work explores with fascination the theme of eroticism and in the relationship – almost lost in contemporary art and recovered from my workshop as a Mexican sculptor – between human beings and their most animal side.

Rebellion in my style

My style bets on rebellion but also on integrating styles typical of cultural richness such as those expressed by Mesoamerican cultures, the shamanic quests that I try to show in my works and throughout my exploration as a Mexican sculptor.

I try to represent in the bronze sculptures the relationship between man and nature, I explore how human aspects intervene in it and with animals, plants, or even the stars.

In the sculpture “Rhinoceros,” I express the union between the aggressiveness of the African animal and the reality of the human being. The beast’s fury is only reflected once it has encountered an obstacle in its path and does not hesitate to use its weapon to make its way.

In this creature, the passivity it shows in its daily life is combined with the strength and fury it reflects once it faces its enemies.

For me, as a Mexican sculptor, my work expresses this duality in three aspects: a mystical one where I talk about more metaphysical dualities such as those of man and his gods, a romantic one where love is observed in its most extreme archetypes of pain-pleasure, and a natural one where the animal beings represented also suffer their own dualities, mainly those where they most resemble the human being.

The product of my work as a Mexican sculptor is in constant experimentation, I work with different materials and forms, I seek at all times to make my pieces objects full of poetry, originality, and meaning.

The meaning of my work

Poetry can transform everything and as a Mexican sculptor, I try to demonstrate it when talking about pain in works like “Mine” or “Pains” where I express the great grief of love and the passion that ends up exhausting or defeating lovers.

In them, I express all the pain that love can cause as an expression of pain.

In the first bronze sculpture, the union of the lover clinging to the body of the beloved is expressed, and in the other, I portray the woman’s body expressed in what seems to be a giant gum that treats with irony the pain caused by erotic desire.

Being a self-taught artist, he focuses his work on these proposals that unite opposites and create harmony between contrasts.

For example, in works like “Equs” or “Black Bull,” the animals are faced with their own natural pain caused by human situations such as bullfighting but vindicated in their expression of beauty and power against those pains, just as my work as a Mexican sculptor captures and immortalizes with attention to detail.

In other bronze works such as “King of the Sea,” I portray the mysticism of the deities comparing them with the tired man who sleeps awaiting the movements of the tides.

The aquatic world is an important part of the expression of my work as a Mexican sculptor, due to the proximity to the sea that I have thanks to being a neighbor of the coasts of the Riviera Maya.

When I see people looking at the works in an exhibition, I want them to touch them, to feel them, I wish they could feel the same sensation that I have when I make them.

I have had the opportunity to be recognized as a Mexican sculptor and representative of contemporary fantastic realism in some spaces such as the Agora Gallery in New York where I offered a diverse sample of my proposals in February and March of 2016.

Angela Di Bel, director of Agora Gallery in New York, said a few words that I appreciate: “I selected Arzate’s work because it speaks of themes that continue to fascinate in art: mysticism, love, pain, and nature.”

I am a Mexican sculptor who also lives a duality in my art and in my professional life in Cancun, Quintana Roo, where for years I have worked as a dentist. Being a dentist is like doing sculpture in a small scale.