TRACES: Juan Muñoz

Today is the occasion to bear in mind Juan Muñoz (17/6/1953-28/8/2001). Regarded as one of the most important sculptors of his generation, Juan Muñoz was known for his return to the human form in art and for his emphasis on the relationship of sculpture, architecture and the viewer. In sculptures, drawings, ‘conversation pieces’, and immersive installations, he often placed the viewer in dramatic relationship to space and objects that were at once architectural and implied narrative. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…

By Dimitris Lempesis

Juan Muñoz was born in 1953, the second of seven brothers, into a prosperous, educated family in Madrid. He was enrolled in a local school but became bored and was expelled, so his father retained a poet who was also an art critic to provide lessons, which gave Muñoz an awareness of modernism.  He grew up under Franco’s repressive regime. Juan Muñoz studied Architecture at the Technical University of Madrid. In the 1970s, he moved to England to study at Croydon College and the Central School of Art and Design.There he met his wife, sculptor Cristina Iglesias, with whom he has two children. In 1982 he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and traveled to the United States to study at the Pratt Institute in New York City. Muñoz came to international prominence in the mid-1980s with works that placed the human figure in architectural environments. Muñoz’s installations are both dramatic and theatrical, using scale and perspective to inflect the viewer’s encounter with the work. Muñoz regarded himself as a story-teller, and the uncanny quality of the figures and their enigmatic muteness invite the viewer to construct their own narrative or reading of the work. In the 1990s, Muñoz began to create his well-known “Conversation Pieces” clusters of free-standing figures in carefully arranged groups or ensembles. Made in resin or cast in bronze, the figures are frozen in moments of inner contemplation or exchange, caught with their mouths open or in mid-gesture, adding an eerie and literal stillness to the silence of their conversations. His sources are ranged from literature, architecture, mythology, to music, film, theater, poetry. Ever the storyteller, his artistic activity extended to plays for radio and theater, writings and essays. Frequently, Muñoz’s sculptural tableaux offer the viewer an experience of physical passage through interior spaces, suggesting a psychological landscape of presence and distance, labyrinths and solitudes, urbanscapes and empty interiors, the collective and the individual. Muñoz’s literary work includes essays and writings on artists and architecture. He also produced a number of sound-based works and radio plays in collaboration with composer Gavin Bryars, novelist and art historian John Berger and musician Alberto Iglesias. Muñoz was interested in the creation of auditory arts, creating some works for the radio. One of his more recognized auditory works was a collaboration with British composer Gavin Bryars in 1992 called “A Man in a Room, Gambling” which consisted of Muñoz explaining card tricks over a composition by Bryars. This work allowed Juan Muñoz to combine his interest in the figure of the “specialist” with popular culture around gambling. Backed by music composed by Gavin Bryars, the artist describes different strategies employed in card games in a deliberately technical way, with almost scientific precision. The explanations sound like rundowns of chemical formulas or cooking recipes; listeners hear a mellifluous voice reciting the instructions, but no matter how hard they concentrate, they will always come up against the impossibility of carrying them out. The work is ensconced in the absurdity of attempting to reconstruct a visual experience without the use of images. Originally divided into short segments designed to be inserted in the midst of regular programming, each program begins with a “Good evening. Today we will teach you such and such a trick”. The pieces, ten segments all shorter than five minutes, were played on BBC Radio. In one unpublished radio program (Third Ear, 1992), Juan Muñoz proposed that there are two things which are impossible to represent: the present and death, and that the only way to arrive at them was by their absence. Juan Muñoz died suddenly of cardiac arrest caused by an aneurism of the esophagus and an internal hemorrhage at the age of 48 in his summer home in Santa Eulària des Riu, Ibiza.