Juan Muñoz - Spanish Sculptor 1953-2001
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By m.p. - Feb 4, 2008 - 3:41 PM
Interest in the work of Juan Muñoz has increased with a retrospective currently on at the Tate Modern in London

Described variously as a showman, an illusionist, a man who set out to amuse and astonish with his unsettling work, and who himself said he was a storyteller, the Spanish sculptor, Juan Muñoz, died suddenly in August 2001 at the age of 48. It was just two months after he opened his ten-month exhibition at the Tate Modern, Double Bind, which was commissioned by the Tate itself and was on show in the Turbine Hall.
The Tate Galleries Director, Nicholas Serota, spoke of Muñoz as ‘a distinctive figure within a generation of European artists whose work has significantly extended the language of sculpture.’

Born in Madrid in 1953, Juan Muñoz was the second of seven children. He said his first interest in art came at the age of 14 when his father hired the Latin teacher from his school to give private lessons to Muñoz and his brother: Santiago Amón was also the art critic for El País newspaper.
Muñoz ran away to London at the age of 17, and attended the Central School of Art and Design in London before receiving a British Council scholarship to study printmaking at the Croydon School of Art. While he was in London he met the woman who would become his wife, the Basque sculptor, Cristina Iglesias.
Muñoz was in the UK until 1981, when he travelled to New York on a Fullbright Scholarship to the Pratt Institute. He was there for a year, and had his first one-man show in the Galería Fernando Vijande in Madrid in 1984, and it was from then on that he began to achieve international prominence for his use of an architectural environment as the setting for his sculpted figures.
Muñoz originally planned to study architecture and did in fact complete two months at university before he left Madrid. He said in an interview the year before he died, ‘I use architecture to give a theatrical frame of reference to the figure,’ it ‘behaves as a backdrop to the figures.’

Anyone who has seen his work will use words like ‘illusion,’ or ‘enigmatic’ to describe it, a sense of unease and solitude within the crowd, and that nothing is as it first seems. He was known for using tricks of perspective and scale to create a feeling of tension between what is real and what is not.
Perhaps what best describes Juan Muñoz’s work is a comment the artist made himself: ‘I try to make the work engaging for the spectator. And then unconsciously, but more interestingly, I try to make you aware that something is really wrong.’

Juan Muñoz died on 28th August 2001 when he suffered a stomach haemorrhage at his holiday home in Ibiza, nine months after he achieved recognition in his home country, where his work was comparatively unknown, with Spain’s most prestigious art award, the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas. It came with a purse of five million pesetas, and the UK’s Guardian newspaper quoted him dryly commenting, ‘I think I’ll buy a watch.’

The Tate Modern is currently showing a retrospective of his work in collaboration with the State Corporation for Spanish Cultural Action Abroad, SEACEX. It is the UK’s largest exhibition on his work since Double Bind, and includes some of his more well-known sculptures and works, as well as others which have not been seen before. It stays at the Tate until 27th April, and then moves on to the Guggenheim in Bilbao at the end of May.

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