BIO
Walter Sanmartin (b. 2005, Long Island, NY) is an artist based in New York, NY, where he is currently pursuing his BFA at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. His interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, performance, and printmaking, often exploring themes of migration, labor, and masculinity. Sanmartin’s work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY; the Rubell Museum in Miami, FL; the Bass Museum in Miami, FL; and the YoungArts Gallery in Miami, FL. He has received national recognition, including the YoungArts Award with Distinction and the Scholastic Art & Writing Gold Medal Portfolio Award.
Artist Statement
Influenced by my migrant background and the blue-collar work that shaped my upbringing, my concepts contextualize the people, places, and patterns that surround me. In my process, I saturate myself with various imagery, music, and materials, fixating on their social/cultural implications. I view my artistic practice as a grapple with apophenia, a string of distant connections to be woven into tangible forms.
I compose my work as deliberate layers of context, bound together by overarching themes: Migration, religion, psychology, and domination, focusing on the remnants that permeate my everyday life— social discrepancies, masculinity, and labor. I regularly revisit topics of American Imperialism, Psychoanalysis, and Social Sculpture, grasping at their intersections, in pursuit of the metaphysical.
My work typically diverges into a performance-esque sculpture, where a piece can live as a record of its processes as well as a standalone sculpture. Instead of being a definitive performance or static work of art, the apex lies somewhere between both. Amidst the beginning and completion of the artwork, the piece crescendos. Although the pieces can be exclusively performed or displayed as sculptures, they reach a form of symbiosis when created this way, making the art impose itself both physically and conceptually.
I’m infatuated with honest mediums, honest forms of communication that aren’t embellished or decadent, but effective and unrestricted by conventionality. Most of my artistic approaches focus on establishing relationships between materials and symbols, creating a conversation within media. In some of my performative processes, like in “Entre Ceuta Y Gibraltar”, I underscore a true ephemerality by having the piece installed into a wall and painted over. Not one of “self-destruction” but of true disregard, a candid expression of futility.
My work exists to project social patterns I observe and experience. Art, to me, is an outcome of study with the intent to dismantle facades.
I compose my work as deliberate layers of context, bound together by overarching themes: Migration, religion, psychology, and domination, focusing on the remnants that permeate my everyday life— social discrepancies, masculinity, and labor. I regularly revisit topics of American Imperialism, Psychoanalysis, and Social Sculpture, grasping at their intersections, in pursuit of the metaphysical.
My work typically diverges into a performance-esque sculpture, where a piece can live as a record of its processes as well as a standalone sculpture. Instead of being a definitive performance or static work of art, the apex lies somewhere between both. Amidst the beginning and completion of the artwork, the piece crescendos. Although the pieces can be exclusively performed or displayed as sculptures, they reach a form of symbiosis when created this way, making the art impose itself both physically and conceptually.
I’m infatuated with honest mediums, honest forms of communication that aren’t embellished or decadent, but effective and unrestricted by conventionality. Most of my artistic approaches focus on establishing relationships between materials and symbols, creating a conversation within media. In some of my performative processes, like in “Entre Ceuta Y Gibraltar”, I underscore a true ephemerality by having the piece installed into a wall and painted over. Not one of “self-destruction” but of true disregard, a candid expression of futility.
My work exists to project social patterns I observe and experience. Art, to me, is an outcome of study with the intent to dismantle facades.