Every Landscape is Fiction 2 opens at MACA with works from the Mediterranean Foundation Collection
01.02.2017
Miquel Navarro's first Ciutat was exhibited in 1974 at the College of Architects in Valencia. Since then, the sculptor specialized in these installations, sculptural landscapes composed of assemblies of small variable elements in series, thus constructing urban landscapes. In apparent contradiction, Navarro builds cities as a way of creating landscape. And this obsession with the city as plastic material is explained through his biography. Miquel Navarro was born in Mislata, a city near Valencia with a large area of farmland. The artist witnessed the disappearance of the rural landscape gradually conquered by the metropolis, by the urban expansion of the capital while disappearing at the frenzied pace of industrialization. The city was invading the rural landscape. Since the 1970s, Miquel Navarro has built cities, small or large installations that extend, across the surface and from a bird's eye view, dozens, hundreds or thousands of pieces in wood, terracotta, lead, zinc or glass of different sizes that configure a metaphysical landscape. Landscape as a reflection of the world around us but also about our own gaze or way of looking at that world around us. Miquel Navarro has managed to develop a way of approaching the artistic phenomenon that is extraordinarily singular in the context of contemporary western sculpture. More information in the full note.
Every Landscape is Fiction 2 is a proposal for deepening the theme of landscape. If this first selection had the natural world as a reference for landscape, this second edition wants to show through a single piece and a single artist, Miquel Navarro, the world of the urban as a construction of contemporary landscape.It is one of the most significant cities for the Valencian artist due to the dimension and presence that this Battle Space acquires. It was presented for the first time in 2002 at the Marlborough gallery in New York with great critical and public success. It was the artist's first individual exhibition in the New York capital and in it he wanted to pay homage to the city after the brutal attack on the Twin Towers on September 11. The center of the exhibition was this installation, Battle Space, composed of a series of aluminum and zinc sculptures of various forms and sizes that resemble a fantastic miniature city, half city, half cemetery. Navarro proposes that we perceive the city from above, like a tracking shot, on a scale that turns man into a giant.The installation, fifteen meters long, seven meters wide, and two meters high, is composed of several series of geometric figures of small dimensions, organized in the form of blocks of houses, which could also be polished tombstones arranged in series in a cemetery. And it is completed with some large-scale elements that resemble New York skyscrapers. Approximately 2,500 pieces in total that, in rigorous arrangement, extend forming pure poetic creation between archaeology and modernity, a metaphor for destroyed civilization.
