Juan Muñoz, the great storyteller through sculpture in the 80s

The Torrelodones house that Juan Muñoz and Cristina Iglesias used as their headquarters during the eighties, bringing some of the most relevant figures of international art, today continues to have a wonderful life.

“It is the house in which I grew up,” says Lucia Muñoz, daughter of the artist and the person who manages the legacy of the Madrid native, who died two decades ago in Ibiza.. Now it is her mother's studio and the office that she uses to publicize the work of one of the most relevant figures on the national scene.. “We continue to go there every day to work. “What was my father's physical studio is now the Estate office.”.

For her daughter, the importance of Torrelodones is fundamental, “because they were very interested in making this place an international hub”. It was a time when there was enormous international interest in seeing what was happening in Spain, “they made their house a place to invite all their international artist friends and that was very powerful”.

The CA2M exhibition, In the Violet Hour, which can be seen until the beginning of January, commemorates the seventy years since the birth of the Madrid artist, one of the most important of the eighties and nineties. “In a dazzling career from his first exhibition in 1984 until his premature death at 48 years of age. The exhibition covers its first decade of history until 1990”, indicates from the art center. Its title, In the Violet Hour, is verse 220 of The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot, one of the artist's favorite poems: “The evening hour that leads home, and brings home the sailor”.

An international artist

For the curator of the exhibition, Ana Ara, Juan Muñoz was a Spanish artist who also connected with the tastes of the moment on an international level.. “Beyond his technical ability, he seems to me to be a person who knew how to generate universal scenographic moments, put you in front of an object as simple as a handrail and create different approaches”.

“Although that first exhibition was not a sales success, it was a success for critics,” he points out.. He will then exhibit in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale and at CAPC in Bordeaux. “It is there that his career – with the support of great commissioners from northern Europe such as Rudy Fuchs, Jan Hoet or Chris Dercon – acquires dazzling international weight”.

Theatricalization

Muñoz's work makes the viewer relate in a very intimate, and at the same time very disturbing, way with the object.. “And that goes beyond contemplating a purely aesthetic work, I feel you in a more relational way,” Ara agrees..

For her daughter there is something fundamental in Muñoz's work: theatricality and narration. “He once defined himself as a storyteller and I think his ability to construct scenes is very unique,” he says.. “And she was also a very pioneer in her time”. On the other hand, in his pieces, when one approaches them, there is a kind of suspension of time. “It's that constant duality, like between laughter and sadness, between the familiar and the uncomfortable,” he says.. “He said that when you arrived at one of his facilities, it could appear that something had happened before or that it could happen after you left.”.

There are three reasons that show great interest in his art in Spain in the eighties: recovering the human figure for statuary, experimenting with the emotional repertoire of the exhibition and raising a reflection on the theatrical possibilities of the installation.

Incommunication

And Lucía Muñoz insists on the human condition of her father's work. “That makes his speech timeless. I believe that when you come to talk about these essential questions of the human condition, the work not only lasts, but also finds ways to communicate and dialogue with contemporary problems and languages,” he develops.. It makes the works contemporary and current, in this way people get “their current problems to talk to them”.

Lack of communication, so associated with our present, is one of the values that his pieces best represent.. “The exhibition is conceived as a circulating story in an enchanted museum, a house of art taken by a rhythmic absence, by a recognition of an inevitable spectrality,” comments from the museum institution.. And the curator relates how “the first and last pieces in this exhibition are portraits without figures and sleight of hand tricks designed to make the magician, the artist, disappear.”. Juan Muñoz, like a sorcerer, like a magician, like someone who does magic tricks.