Juan Muñoz

He studied art in London in the late seventies. From the mid-eighties onwards, he began a meteoric career in Spain that positioned him internationally during the following decade, exhibiting individually in museums and art centers such as the Valencian IVAM, the DIA Foundation in New York, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. National Prize for Plastic Arts from the Ministry of Culture in the year 2000.

His last piece, the impressive installation presented in the Turbine Hall of the London Tate Modern, inaugurated in June 2001, remained on display months after his unexpected death in August of that same year.

Juan Muñoz's contribution to Spanish sculpture in the last two decades of the 20th century is fundamental from a dual perspective: one that links him with international contemporaneity, another that anchors his work in the dramatic tradition of Spanish Baroque.

His first steps follow that line marked by an interest in figuration, neoexpressionism, the representation of the human through the everyday. Later, the dissolution of the sculptural object, its spatial expansion (installation) and conceptual expansion (the dichotomy presence/absence), insert his work into that unstoppable tendency of "sculpture in its expanded field," a concept coined and developed by Rosalind Krauss and which had wide acceptance in the international artistic sphere. The unsettling figures that "listen" to what happens beyond the walls, beyond the real space in which the viewer finds himself, as well as the optical floors that dissolve the solid flat materiality of the ground surface are good examples of this.

The recurring themes of the Spanish Golden Age; illusion, deception, reflection, the falseness of representation, the drama of a reality that fades away, the solitude of the individual, the theater of the world appears with insistent perseverance in Juan Muñoz's works.

Text provided by the Fundación Mediterráneo. Author: J. B. Peiró.