JUAN MUÑOZ

November 25, 1999 - January 22, 2000

Juan Muñoz was born in Madrid, Spain in 1953. He studied at the Central School of Art and Design, London, at the Croydon College of Design and Technology, London and at The Pratt School of Art and Design, London and at The Pratt School of Art and Design in New York. He lives and works in Madrid.

Juan Muñoz describes himself as being a storyteller. His work deals with history, with an awareness of his condition today and the fragments of memory. “Any normal situation”, the artist maintains, “is ready for something to happen, and that relationship between the normal and the discomforting is part of the territory of the work”.

Motifs such as floors, balconies, banisters and figures are recurring in Munoz’s work. His figures are small, less than human size creating a wider physical and conceptual distance between the spectator and the object. He has created figures with rounded bases, figures against the wall, figures sitting on a plinth, figures on someone’s back, like an incubus, figures looking in the mirror. As he is more interested in the totality of the figure, the general composition, the overall presence of the figure in relation to the others, he uses a narrow tonal range and a repertoire of only a few faces. The acceptance of the condition of “blindness” is also important to his pieces. His figures are “looking inwards” perhaps as allegories of communication and its failures, of the impasse of language.

“I wanted people to realize from the very beginning that what I was showing them was a kind of deception... Perhaps the more successful things I have made have always been about something other than what you’re actually looking at. And this other, this reference, this impossibility of representation is a boundary which
confronts the sculpture”.