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18/10/2001

Juan Munoz

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington

Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz (1953--2001), whose sudden death in August shocked the art world, is here honored with his first full retrospective in the United States. Included are nearly 60 sculptures, multi-figure installations, drawings and paintings spanning Muñoz?s career from the mid-1980s to the present.

Muñoz, who studied in Madrid, London, and New York before his first gallery exhibitions in the mid-1980s, is part of a generation of mid-career international artists---Stephan Balkenhol, Robert Gober, Thomas Schütte, and Kiki Smith among them---who reinvigorated figurative sculpture over the last decade. Muñoz?s presentations of slightly smaller than life-size figures often appear staged in architectural settings, creating a heightened awareness of environment and narrative possibility. His work also uses the absence of figures to achieve this effect. A sense of mystery and intrigue in Muñoz?s work has elicited comparisons outside the visual arts to the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, the music of Alfred Schnittke, and the architecture of Francesco Borromini, among others.

Muñoz has had major exhibitions at museums and in outdoor installations throughout Europe. Launching a national tour from the Hirshhorn, the current exhibition includes works infrequently seen on this continent---images of empty domestic interiors, banister sculptures, and a street-like passage lined by smaller-than-life iron balconies and hotel signs---as well as the bronze and pale cast-resin figures for which the artist is best known.

The earliest of these figures, resembling dwarfs or ventriloquists? dummies, pose within patterned floor environments or partial interiors. The "Conversation Pieces" of the 1990s (such as the Hirshhorn plaza sculpture) feature teetering robed people whose lower bodies morph into orbs instead of feet. Laughing clusters of Chinese men in uniform are yet another type. Engaging viewers physically and emotionally, Muñoz?s figures seem to lean secretively toward one another, form a tight clique on a living-room settee, peer down at us from a high balcony, or smile as they ride a toy train together. A 550-pound bronze figure, especially created by Muñoz for the Hirshhorn?s architecture, hangs upside-down on a guy-wire three storeys above the circular outdoor fountain, its falling posture creating a theatrical tension.

The exhibition's itinerary after Washington includes the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (April 21 - Aug. 4, 2002), The Art Institute of Chicago (Sept. 14 - Dec. 1, 2002), and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (Jan. 16 - Mar. 23, 2002).

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Independence Avenue at Seventh Street, SW Washington DC 20560-0350 p (202) 357-3091 - f (202) 786-2682

Hours:
Open daily except December 25
Museum: 10 a.m. until 5:30 p.m.
Plaza: 7:30 a.m. until 5:30 p.m.
Sculpture Garden: 7:30 a.m. until dusk

Admission: Free

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