Jim Rennert: shaping the art of the deal.

• Author: Campbell, Carolyn
• Position: Spotlight

Jim Rennert has found that determination and persistence are ingredients for success in athletic, artistic and business endeavors. Before becoming an artist, Rennert was a BYU wrestling scholarship recipient who later worked in business arenas such as sales, investment banking and stock brokering. "I had always visualized business as a wrestling match-fight for the sale, then fight to get paid," he says.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

So, in his later days as an artist, when real estate developer Tom Lloyd asked him to create a sculpture for the lobby of Salt Lake's Union Park Center, he cast a sculpture of two men dressed in suits who were wrestling, titling it "A Deal's A Deal." "Tom loved it," Rennert recalls. Lloyd was the first of many collectors who treasure sculptures from Rennert's "Suits" series, which embodies the concept of sports as a metaphor for the competitive nature of business and life.

"What's helped me the most is what I learned in my athletic pursuits-and that is to stay in the game," he says. "If you quit, you never reach the end of the road and don't see the reward that was potentially yours." Along with enduring, "In business, you have to be competitive. The idea of taking on tremendous odds, moving forward in spite of everything and succeeding is very intriguing to me," says Rennert.

Rennert's works symbolically create scenes that take place in business every day-taking risks, making contacts, meeting deadlines, aiming for goals and grappling with conflict. For instance, "Walking the Tightrope" depicts a man balanced on a high, thin, edge of a vertical monolith, while "Corner Office" portrays an executive poised at the top of a tall, steep flight of stairs. "Networking," a work in progress, renders a man casting a fishing line in hopes of achieving a connection. "Business has become the...