JUAN MUÑOZ: COMING TOWARDS
Skarstedt Paris presents an exhibition of sculptures by Spanish artist Juan Muñoz. Coming Towards illustrates the progression of a full decade of the artist’s short but impactful career.
March 21 – April 27, 2024
Muñoz believed that a sculpture is activated by its relationship to the viewer and the surrounding architecture. Understanding that sculpture only makes sense in human terms, his figures function as mini narratives that playfully, almost mischievously, speak to the lives we lead, our relationship to the world around us, and the enigma of the smallest human gesture.
This is perhaps most evident in pieces that utilize the wall or the ceiling, involving the entire space as part of the work. Albuquerque Balcony (1993), for instance, reveals two characteristically gray figures seated across from each other on a cramped balcony positioned over the viewer’s head.
By forcing the viewer to come closer than is natural, and to crane their neck to see the piece in full, Muñoz’s trickster side comes out—a description he welcomed and cultivated. Tricks of scale and slights of hand continue in Three Laughing at One (2000), which is rendered at slightly smaller than life-size and positioned just high enough on the wall that the three men appear not only in a fit of raucous laughter, but higher up and farther away than they really are, which draws the viewer in closer.
Likewise, Untitled (1991), with its voluminous round bottom, feels like it could topple over at any minute, and yet he remains firmly upright, while Blotter Figures: Coming Towards (1999) can move forward with ease, and yet cannot see where he is going. These choices not only remove any sense of naturalism from the figures, but their singularity as figures investigate solitude and the failures of communication, balancing conviction and a lack of conviction.
Muñoz belongs to an important group of sculptors from the 1980s and 1990s such as Robert Gober, Charles Ray, and Thomas Schütte who reinvigorated the human form in three dimensions, ushering in a new era of the medium—a trend seen throughout those decades across all media by painters including Eric Fischl, David Salle, George Condo, and Jeff Koons.
Taking the interest in space and formal discipline of minimalism, coupling it with the intellectual restraint of conceptual art, and transferring it to figuration, Muñoz’s figures are at once humorous and fraught, unsettling and inviting, alive and frozen. They reveal his deep understanding of art history and the human condition, yet deny the viewer the satisfaction of teaching us some sort of universal truth. Instead, Muñoz’s leaves his viewer with allegories, speaking in three-dimensions what we cannot in words.