b. 1953, Madrid; d. 2001, Ibiza
Juan Muñoz was born in 1953 in Madrid. From 1976 to 1977, he attended the Central School of Art and Design in London (now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design). From 1979 to 1980, he studied printmaking at Croydon College of Design and Technology. In 1981 he moved to New York to attend the Pratt Institute, School of Art and Design and work as an artist-in-residence at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York. He returned to Spain the following year and devoted a year to curating, before turning his attention to sculpting. Muñoz’s early body of work, begun in 1984, consisted of sculptures of isolated architectural components like balcony railings mounted onto the gallery walls. His first solo exhibition, held at Galería Fernando Vijande in 1984, showcased these early sculptures. He continued to experiment with displaced architectural elements, notably his surreally inclining or drooping banister rails created between 1987 and 1991.
Muñoz is perhaps best known for his enigmatic sculptures of strangely haunting human figures created from the late 80s until his untimely death at the age of forty-eight in 2001. His sculptural installations are like stage sets populated by maudlin characters, implying narratives of conspiracy, despair, and isolation. Despite the often-unsettling qualities of his work, Muñoz consistently acknowledged the emotional range of the human condition, from the absurd and irrational to the poignant and humorous. Shown individually and in groups, the figure—inspired by ventriloquist dummies, dwarves, and punching-bag clowns—is a constant presence in his work. Cast in bronze or resin, the sculptures are modeled with an abbreviated naturalism and can appear convincingly real, although they are often shown in impossible positions, such as seated in chairs mounted on a wall or suspended upside down from existing architectural elements. In the late 90s, Muñoz’s mise-en-scènes evolved from the small architectural elements in his early work to larger installations that reconfigured and transformed space by cutting through walls or adding false floors. Muñoz created a haunting alleyway for A Place Called Abroad (1998), a site-specific installation created for the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. Throughout his career, the artist also devised works for radio and performance pieces, often in collaboration with composers.
Since his first exhibition in the United States at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 1990, numerous solo exhibitions have been mounted of Muñoz’s work by organizations like Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (1991), Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (1992), Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (1994), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (1995), Museo Nacional de Reina Sofía in Madrid (1996), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (1997), and Tate Modern (2001). A major posthumous retrospective of his work was mounted in 2008 at the Tate Modern. His work has also been included in the Venice Biennale (1986 and 1997), Carnegie International (1991), Documenta 9 (1992), and Syndey Biennale (2000). Since his first essay “Notas afinas a tres” (1982), written for an exhibition he co-curated with Carmen Giménez in Madrid, Muñoz’s writings have been published internationally. The artist died on August 28, 2001 in Ibiza, Spain.