Mictlantecuhtli

Sometimes an artwork doesn't need to be reimagined.

It simply needs to be looked at carefully.

Mictlantecuhtli is an honest study of an historic sculpture representing the Aztec god of death. The original work is part of the collection of the Xalapa Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, and has been photographed and digitally scanned as part of its preservation and documentation.

Our sculpture began with one of those digital scans.

But the final piece was not printed.

It was sculpted by hand.

Working from the museum's scan as a reference, the form was carefully rebuilt in oil clay, focusing on the shapes, proportions, expression, and character of the original object.

The result is a study rather than an attempt to improve, modernize, or reinterpret the ancient work.

And there is one detail that makes the original particularly memorable:

He smiles.

A god associated with death, wearing an unmistakable smile.

We don't need to decide exactly what that smile means. Perhaps it is symbolic. Perhaps it is ceremonial. Perhaps the expression held a meaning that made perfect sense to the people who created it and has been partially lost to time.

What we can do is look.

Really look.

The original sculpture has survived centuries, and now exists in a museum where people can encounter it far removed from the world in which it was created. This piece is our way of spending a little more time with it.

A digital scan preserves the geometry.

A museum preserves the object.

A hand-sculpted study preserves something else:

the experience of looking closely.

Mictlantecuhtli is a tribute to that experience—a contemporary artist's careful encounter with an historic work, translated from stone and pixels back into the language of the human hand.

This is a piece of magnetic art. It was hand sculpted and cast in durable urethane with a high strength magnet. It is hand painted and may differ slightly from the image above.