Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz is best known for his enigmatic figurative sculptures. He pioneered a distinctive form of sculpture that immersed and involved the viewer, believing that sculpture only made sense in human terms.
Muñoz was born in Madrid and grew up under the repressive regime of General Franco. Expelled from school in Madrid, Muñoz was taught instead by a poet and it was with this teacher that he first discovered the Modernist art movement. After briefly studying architecture at the University of Madrid in the early 1970s, Muñoz moved to London and, in 1976, trained for a year at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and subsequently at Croydon College of Design and Technology. In 1981 he moved to New York, where he studied at the Pratt Graphic Center. While in New York, he was also an artist-in-residence at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center and expanded his work into sculpture. It was here that he met Richard Serra, as well as Mario Merz, for whom he worked as an assistant.
Throughout the 1990s, Muñoz, who described himself as a ‘story-teller,’ developed his own unique style, breaking the traditional rules of sculpture. He liked to create a narrative with his sculptures, building human-like figures and positioning them in stage-like installations, so that it appeared as though they were interacting with each other. This construct allowed Muñoz to ask the spectator to relate to the figures, or even become part of the sculpture altogether. Cast in bronze, resin, or pâpier-maché, the sculptures appear naturalistic and, at times, convincingly real. However, Muñoz distorted this realism by placing the figures in often-impossible positions: seated in chairs mounted on a wall or suspended upside down from existing architectural elements.
Muñoz’s first exhibition was held in the Fernando Vijande Gallery in Madrid in 1984, and was later followed by many exhibitions of his sculptures throughout Europe and the world. His distinctive work is included in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and Tate Modern, London, among others.
Juan Muñoz died in 2001 at the age of 48 in Spain.
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