Hugo Marín is a Chilean sculptor, painter, traveler and teacher of the Transcendental Meditation technique. His curiosity and knowledge seem endless; his mind, as boundless as bold, is reflected in the distinct style of his work.
The first source of energy: The world outside
A couple of months ago, Hugo Marín turned 85. Yet what really attracts attention is that in his life, age is just a fact, a mere number. His social activities and artistic creativity are as dynamic as ever.
Half of the secret of this vitality is Marín’s inexhaustible curiosity about everything what is going on around him; in his back yard, in his town, in Chile, in the whole world. “I am a person who uses the moment… I’m all the time thinking, moving, creating,” he says. 
Hugo Marín’s impressive career as an artist – primarily in sculpture, but with forays into painting, ceramics, and collage – is inextricably linked with his life story. And like his life, his art is far from uniform. It’s impossible to pinpoint one pattern or to attach a defining label.
Besides the countless honors he has received both in Chile and abroad, Hugo Marín has had personal exhibitions in Paris, France; Lucerne, Switzerland; Brussels, Belgium; Geneva, Switzerland; New York, USA; Washington, USA; Lima, Peru; Stockholm, Sweden and Quito, Ecuador.
Photo: Carlos Quezada / La Tercera
“I like that what we usually call ‘style’, a taste for style,” explains the maestro. “Not one style in particular, because I keep switching from one to another. I have that ability, that artistic virtue of changing, very rapidly, the external form of my work.”
“I am someone who has lived in many corners of the world. That’s why my sculptures reflect my experience with African art, pre-Columbian art, Japanese art… People often try to define me, but I don’t think it can be done successfully.”
The second source of energy: The world inside
The other half of Hugo Marín’s secret of vitality is that for over 40 years, he has been meditating twice a day.
Back in 1966, he met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the teacher and founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement. Marín went to study Maharishi’s art of being and living in Switzerland and India, and became a teacher of the TM technique.
Meditation has linked him up with consciousness at its deepest levels. “With Transcendental Meditation, I get to states that are beyond intellect and discursive information. These states transcend the duality of the observer and the observed,” he explains.
Marín is outright about the role meditation has played in the trajectory and texture of his life. And the process of spiritual deepening is ongoing. The deeper you get to the source of consciousness, the more it affects everything you from day to day.
“When you practice meditation, you’re being linked up with pure knowledge. You refresh your contact with that emptiness which is nothing but the full potential. That state of pure silence and stillness has always existed; and it is both nothing and everything, the absolute unmanifested, the pure potential,” says the artist.
Source of the article:
“Potencialidad viva” by Cintya Ramirez / Mario Vivado, Mosso
