3rd Prize Winner
Yasha Young Projects Sculpture Award
Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize 2025
Max Leiva
Title:
“Nexus”
Medium & Dimensions:
Bronze, 55 x 14 x 14 cm.
About the Artist
Max Leiva was born in Guatemala on January 17, 1966. He studied for three years at the Rafael Rodríguez Padilla National School of Plastic Arts, between 1972 and 1975. In 1988, he enrolled in the National School of Plastic Arts. In 1991, when he was in his third year of studies at the School of Fine Arts, he traveled to Bangkok, Thailand on a UNESCO scholarship to study sculpture at Silpakorn University where he worked in clay and plaster directly with live models. On his return from Bangkok, he decided to set up a small workshop in his mother’s house and began to teach. In 1996, the Guatemalan Olympic Committee gave him his first international commission: a sculpture of a Mayan Ball Player, to be installed at the Olympic Academy in Olympia, Greece. He has participated in important sculpture symposia in different parts of the world and with the support of companies he organized the 1st. and 2nd. International Sculpture Festival “Guatemala Immortal”. Participant in collective exhibitions and International Art Fairs in Miami, California, Colorado; among others. His last solo exhibitions, Museo de Arte del Salvador in 2016, “Pernexus” Guatemala City in 2018, “Synopsis” Palm Springs, California in 2019 and “Relieves” in Guatemala City in November 2022 and his last exhibition with Ramon Avila “Encuentro” in 2023. Several public monuments such as the Monument to Miguel Angel Asturias on Guatemala City in 1999.
“Nexus”: attempts to reflect an inner experience: the profound dependence that can exist between human beings. Sometimes symbiotic, sometimes codependent. Can we truly sustain ourselves without “the other”? Is an object, a tree, a pet enough to fill that void? What does it mean to create bonds, to engender, to inherit the gaze? In times when the human bond seems to weaken—due to noise, haste, or uncertainty—this work reminds us, without stridency, the need to preserve what connects us.
