The beauty and the grandeur of human form are at the heart of Walter Peter Brenner‘s work. This Guatemalan sculptor has for 17 years been developing works which go against the dogmas of his time and which exalt, by their nobility, an heroic sense of life.
His father, a well known Guatemalan artist, introduced him to painting and drawing at an early age. However, the young Walter Peter Brenner at first turned his attention to architecture, before crossing the Atlantic to study sculpture at the Zurich school of Fine Arts, then visual arts once back in Guatemala.
It’s probably this initial builder’s impulse which led him to direct his artistic talents towards 3 dimensional artworks, often of considerable proportions. His Colossus of Inmaco, which stands proudly in the very heart of Guatemala city, is a statue 10 meters in height and took 5 years to complete.
Walter Peter Brenner tirelessly explores the human form which, as he says, he loves. In going against the dogmas of his time, his conviction is that “beauty itself is objective and that it depends on the correct mathematical integration of the parts to the whole”. It is therefore no surprise to find in his sculptures references to antiquity, be it in the themes (Prometheus, Hercules, Atlas…) or in the bodies of his works (athletic, powerful, noble and in a determined pose.)
The artist himself speaks of “a romantic heroism” to qualify his works which, just like his Master of your own Destiny sculpture, seem to say that man is equipped to shape his own destiny… on the condition that he approaches life with courage, wisdom and temperance.
