Contemporary art
An exhibition celebrates with a dozen major works the innovative and truncated talent of one of the most international Spanish artists | Died in 2002 at the age of 48, he placed the bewildered viewer at the center of his haunting and theatrical sculptures.
Enigma. Paradox. Showmanship. Irony. Bewilderment. Attraction. Frustration. These are words that define the singular work of Juan Muñoz (Madrid, 1953- Ibiza, 2001) who died at the age of 48 and is already established as one of the most international Spanish artists. Twenty-two years after his death and when it will be 70 years since his birth, an exhibition celebrates his unique talent and his rich legacy in the Alcalá 31 rooms of the Community of Madrid. Entitled ‘Everything I See Will Survive Me’, it brings together a dozen major works produced between 1989 and 2001, the last ten years of his career. Conceived as an installation of installations, it will be on display until June 11.
Manuel Segade is the curator of this exhibition that celebrates the talent of a gifted creator who recovered figuration in the abstract and expressionist eighties and mixed fiction and reality like no other. “A conjurer of art in love with lies, who cares as much about the trick as the story that is made of the trick, which is what he tries to convey in an absolutely unique work,” sums up the curator. Segade will also be responsible for the complementary exhibition that will be hosted by the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Móstoles from June 17, the day on which Muñoz would have turned 70.
Detail of ‘Two Watchamen’ (1993), characteristic resin rocker. /
«It confronts us with otherness, with otherness. His pieces are like plays in which he manages to get the viewer to stop acting as a mere observer and become part of the plot. Like Pirandello, he makes the theater part of the theatre”, highlights Segade. “I am interested in theater because I cannot answer it, Muñoz himself said,” adds the curator to explain the disturbing theatricality of his work.
His pieces thus oscillate between paradox and bewilderment, with motors that do not move anything, drums that do not sound, observers that cannot see you, empty balconies, mute interlocutors, blind dwarves who look at themselves in very high mirrors, utilities that house mazes in their interior or a square full of Asians who laugh at something without us knowing what the joke is about. “He wants, in a certain way, for the work to be scary, often giving it a sinister and disturbing tone,” says the curator.
fiction and reality
“For Muñoz, the way of seeing and interpreting the work is in itself part of the work of art,” says Segade. He erases the boundaries of fiction and reality “but points out the fatality that this entails and the dangers of manipulation. If fiction is imposed on reality, he warns us, problems begin: and there are the ‘fake news’ that are anticipated », he adds.
There is no doubt in Segade that, if he were still alive, Muñoz would be the most international Spanish artist today. «It would be much more important than it is now. He entered the history of art by full right, including the theatrical in plastic representation and the spectator as part of the work, as an actor in the art spectacle. And he achieved it with only sixteen years of experience », Segade reiterates about the renowned sculptor who was also a critic, essayist and writer.
Manuel Segade, curator of the exhibition, next to one of the pieces. /
The title of the exhibition is a quote from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova that Muñoz collected in a preparatory note for her last and legendary exhibition, in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London in 2001, the first by a Spanish artist in this space. That installation, ‘Doble tether’, was the pinnacle of his career and a unique milestone in the history of Spanish contemporary art.
Back to Spain
No colleague had achieved the international notoriety of Muñoz in the last decades of the 20th century. And he did it in a brilliant journey from his first exhibition in 1984. Not surprisingly, the great international collectors and gallery owners noticed his work before the Spanish. so much of his work is in large international museums.
‘With the cord alla mouth’ (1997). Tribute by Juan Muñoz to the trapeze artist Mis La La La. /
Like the most iconic work in the exhibition, ‘Plaza’, created in 1986 for the Palacio de Velázquez in the Museo Reina Sofía and in which some thirty smiling Asians whom Muñoz called ‘Chinese’, short and standing but without feet, they laugh at something that escapes the viewer. Made of gray painted resin, all the figures have different postures but the same face. It is based on a 19th century Chinese head that Muñoz scaled up and replicated in series and in which there was already that sardonic and disturbing smile so characteristic of Muñoz’s figures. Acquired by a German collector, it was finally donated to the Düsseldorf Museum, and until now it had not returned to Spain. Muñoz was color blind “and perhaps that explains why there is so little color in his work,” says Segade.
“I build metaphors as sculptures because I can’t conceive of any other way to explain what affects me,” said a creator open to all possibilities, and with no preference for any material. “I am unfaithful to them, and I hope they do the same,” he ironized.
‘Allo specchio’ (1997), Muñoz’s play on laughter and the mask before a mirror. /
He did not believe that the function of sculpture was to “create new forms”, which is why he opted for that narrative that supposes for the creator and the viewer a reflection on eternal elements in art such as the human figure and still lifes.
Muñoz died suddenly in Ibiza, on August 28, 2002, due to an aortic aneurysm that took his life in seconds. He was married to Cristina Iglesias, the other great Spanish sculpture with international projection. Lucía Muñoz Iglesias, who was twelve years old when her father died, is today the administrator of her legacy, and she has managed to preserve a good part of her work in our country.
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